


you dared not look.  a human voice, / you thought

by inkandcayenne



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-11 20:03:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 28,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4450373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandcayenne/pseuds/inkandcayenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At North Shore they called it <i>repetition compulsion</i>: the desire to throw himself into a ravine because at least he recognized the landscape.  They warned him that he would do this again, and again, and again if he wasn’t careful. “It’s like you’re always bracing for a fight,” Laurie said once, “and if it doesn’t happen, you create one.”  Sophia’s blood on the driveway, Marty’s blood in the parking lot, Psyche with her goddamn lamp, poking at a good thing until it’s scorched and screaming.  There’s only one story, the oldest: “You climb a tree too high for you,” his pop said, as he passed Rust a bottle of whiskey and began to splint his arm, “you best be prepared to fall and get hurt.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ontogeny

**Author's Note:**

> _Katabasis_ , or descent into the underworld, is a feature of many religious and literary texts: the hero, often in an act of suffering and self-sacrifice, travels to the land of the dead and comes back changed. Jesus is probably the most famous example, and the most obvious analogue for Rust. But I've always been partial to the myth of Psyche and Cupid (you can read a summary [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid_and_Psyche) and the whole thing [here](http://www.storyneeds.com/cupid-and-psyche.html)). The title is taken from A.E. Stallings' "[Three Poems to Psyche](http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/v12n1/v12n1poetry/stallingsthree.php)": Cupid comes to Psyche in the dark, and while his voice and caresses are gentle and kind, she is afraid to look at him because she's convinced it's all too good to be true; he must be a monster. When she lifts her lamp to kill him, she realizes he's actually the God of Love himself; but just at that moment oil spills on Cupid and he awakes, badly burned and angry at her betrayal. (Then he flies out the window like the fucking drama queen that he is.) Psyche faces a series of impossible tasks, including a descent into the underworld, to win Cupid back. Her story is one of someone who drives away those who love her because of her own fear of her unworthiness; her triumph is not just in being reunited with her lover, but in proving to herself and to others that she deserves to be loved.

_ontogeny_. the developmental history of an organism; in psychology, the cognitive development of children.

\---

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink  
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;  
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink  
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;  
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,  
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;  
Yet many a man is making friends with death  
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.  
\--Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Love is not all"

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;  
so many things seem filled with the intent  
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.  
\--Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly  
in anticipation of silence.  
The ear gets used to them.  
The eye gets used to disappearances.  
_You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared._  
\--Louise Glück, “October”

  ---

Rust is nineteen, on leave in Paris, when he sees Gérard’s _Psyche and Amor_ at the Louvre.  The unseen god of love bends like a tree-branch over his mortal prey, ready to strangle or embrace, his punishing dart withdrawn at the last moment in favor of a gentle kiss.  Psyche gazes out at the viewer, her face a mask, her eyes deep pits.  He reads in the plate next to the painting that she’s innocent, reserved, the Soul awakening to its desire for union with God.  She just looks shell-shocked to him, and why wouldn’t she?  She must have sensed it, even then, the violence tightening around her like a noose, the malice of a mother she’s never even met.  Fated to be abandoned on a rocky crag until Love found her, only to lose her one chance at happiness, with no one to blame but her own doubt and carelessness and fear.  

Still: _fuck_ Cupid, that whiny, entitled mama’s boy who flew away just because he could.  Rust can’t bring himself to blame her; like Psyche, he doesn’t believe in angels that come to caress you in the dark, only in monsters biding their time before they bear their teeth.  He, too, would have clenched the knife in his fist and struck out in blind self-defense against those loving hands.  

He is nineteen and the only thing he understands about himself is that he has no loyalty.  It must be true; the only person who truly knows him said so.

Psyche, still untouched, stares out at Rust.  Stormclouds are gathering in her gray eyes, electricity under the surface of her porcelain skin.  He stares back, staggering slightly, tipsy on cheap Parisian table wine.   _Strap in, sweetheart,_ he thinks. _You’re cute enough, but you’re a stupid bitch, and you’re about to fuck things up royally._

He imagines her at the end of the story.  After three impossible tasks, a trip to the underworld, and a peek into a forbidden cask in hopes she might make herself worthy of love again, she lies comatose at the mouth of Hell.  She awakes to a sharp pain to see her lover bending over her once more, ready to strangle or embrace, with all the reason in the world to do the former.  She betrayed him; she burned him.  Rust imagines her gaze then, magnified in its terrified blankness, the hollow-eyed surety that she’s going to fuck up again and again and again.  She holds her breath and waits for judgment.  

Eros had to make her immortal, of course; she wasn’t good enough for him as she was.

\---

He’s encountered his share of armchair psychologists over the years, each with their own pet theories about what makes him tick--improperly, like a watch that only tells the right time on Mars.  His pop composed extended monologues on the subject.  Rust had sleepless eyes and a restless heart, he said.  He lived his life  _upon_ the land rather than _of_ it.  He lacked the courage to let things take root in him, pull him close to the soil and flower; he hovered six inches above the earth, brain in the trees, hands grasping for the stars.  Travis was usually high when he said these things, which is not the same thing as being wrong.  

Claire’s mother thought he needed Jesus; her hippie aunt thought he needed to get his chakras realigned.  Laurie said once, near the end, that he needed to fuck back off to whatever arctic forest he’d crawled out of so he could stop infecting people with his manipulative pseudo-philosophical bullshit.  “There’s something missing in you,” Claire said during one of his brief and erratic visits home, maybe three weeks before she left.  She stared out the window at their driveway, dragging listlessly on the joint between her chipped-polish fingertips.  The pot made her words spin out like fraying ribbons.  “I don’t know what it is.  You look whole from the outside but I think something necessary got scraped out before I ever met you.  You’re empty and hollow and you wouldn’t admit you were hungry if someone was holding a knife to your throat.”  

He never tries to explain himself to any of them, except once, to Marty. He’d given a team of local beat cops barely old enough to shave a well-deserved tongue-lashing for their incompetence, condescension dripping off his tongue like bile.  ( _You isolate yourself when you speak in that tone of voice_ , they told him at North Shore.   _You should be more open and receptive_.)  Two or three of them are starting to physically pull back like scared rabbits.  The rest are just staring daggers at his partner: _why don’t you put a fucking leash on him._

He’s not a rabid dog, he thinks, as they get back into the car.  Just one of those frogs that poison you if you touch it.

“You hate everybody, don’t you?” Marty grumbles.

“I don’t even hate most people,” he replies without looking up from his ledger.  

“Coulda fooled me.”

“I don’t consider them _necessary_ ,” he retorts, grinding his teeth only a little.  “There’s a difference.”

“Yeah, well, contrary to what you may believe, society ain’t exactly a--what did you call it?”

“Ontological fallacy.”

“Yeah.  Some people actually _need_ other people.”

“Some people do,” he says.  “But given the right confluence of circumstances, it’s possible to outgrow such things.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to see what Rust's looking at, here's Gérard’s _[Psyche and Amor](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Gerard_FrancoisPascalSimon-Cupid_Psyche_end.jpg)_.


	2. elpis

_elpis_. the last spirit in Pandora's jar; the hope of something better in the midst of suffering.

\---

But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men.  Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds.  But the rest, countless plagues, wander amongst men; for earth is full of evils and the sea is full.

\--Hesiod, _The Works and Days_

Scholars tell us  
that there is no point in knowing what you want  
when the forces contending over you  
could kill you.

\--Louise Glück, “Persephone the Wanderer”

\---

When Rust was eighteen months old, his mother took him to the shore.  She forgot to bring sunscreen, and that night he’d wake with a sunburn so bad his skin blistered, but on the shore a soft breeze blew off the waves and eased the harsh sunshine into a gentle warmth, and the sound of the waves lulled him to sleep on a sandy blanket.  

He does not remember it.  But when he is thirteen he gets shitfaced drunk for the first time on something cheap and strong in a bottle passed hand to hand out behind the school.  It burns like molten rock going down, but he figures it’s better quality than whatever his pop brews in that padlocked shed out in the woods.  

It’s November, a week before Thanksgiving.  The skies are steel-gray and punishing, and what hits his cheeks is more ice than snow.  But after three or four pulls on the bottle, warmth starts to unfurl through his limbs like flower petals in spring and he feels the tension that has knotted him up as long as he can remember slacken and ease.  He leans his head back and feels himself sway, ever so slightly, in tune with some rhythm he cannot identify.   

Without ever knowing it, he’ll spend the rest of his life chasing the sensation of being rocked to sleep by sea and sun, easy and quiet and warm.

\----

_Psyche, the all-beautiful, sat sad and solitary, only admired, never loved._

\----

He assumes, without ever consciously thinking about it, that he must not have been a particularly likeable toddler.  That the strangeness that hangs over him like a shroud and keeps everyone at arm’s length must have been with him even then. It is the only way he can wrap his mind around what she did.

One day, when Sophia is nearly the same age as he was then, they are sitting in the backyard in the late autumn sunlight.  She is barefoot, in her little yellow dress embroidered with bumblebees, giggling when the grass tickles her legs; she’s pulling at a patch of clover with her small fingers, offering the flowers to her father with a grin that shows off her small collection of seed-pearl baby teeth.  He takes a pinkish-white blossom and tucks it in his shirt pocket and thinks, _I must have been nothing like this.  No one would leave a child like this._

\---

_Accordingly Apollo said that Psyche, dressed in deepest mourning, must be set on the summit of a rocky hill and left alone . . . . On the high hilltop in the darkness Psyche sat, waiting for she knew not what terror._

\---

“It’s ‘cause you’re from Texas,” his old man says sometimes, when Rust complains about the cold.  (“Hush your goddamn whining,” is usually what he says.  Travis is from Sacramento, or maybe Minnesota, or maybe Chicago--the story changes a lot.)  

Rust is six when he finds a magazine in the lobby of the bank while Travis argues with the mortgage officer.  Fifty pages of fifty photos, one for each state.  He flips quickly past Alaska there on the second page and keeps turning, past vineyards and wheat fields and cranberry bogs, until he gets to Texas there near the end.  Gray-green shrubs that hug the edges of the landscape, sky so blue it makes his teeth ache.  A profusion of tiny desert flowers clustered in the foreground, a whisper of mountains barely visible on the horizon.  Too much of everything; it makes his head spin and his heart seize up.  He thinks if he can just get back there, to that warm and florid place he can’t quite remember, all the broken and jagged pieces of his life will fit back together again.  He waits until the bank tellers are all looking the other way and then rips the page out and stuffs it in his back pocket. 

“I’m from Texas,” he tells people after that.  He ages into teenhood and waits for a chance to escape, knowing that he’s running out of time, that some point this place will seep into him and leave him too frozen and half-mad for any semblance of normalcy.  

\---

Rust doesn’t remember the two or three times, early on, that he’d asked when momma was coming to get him.  Travis never responded to such queries, and by the time he’s four or five he simply takes it for granted that he’s not to ask.  It’s not until the second grade that the child of some barfly who frequents the same hole in the wall as Travis (back when he was still part of the world enough to do his drinking in bars) illuminates Rust as to certain circumstances concerning his own personal history.

He takes the long way home, weaving around frozen rivers and ice-studded pines.  Pushes the door open slowly just as the sun is setting, sets his books and boots down, and turns to face his father.

“She just took off?” he says.

Travis is mending a tear in Rust’s shirt.  He doesn’t look up.  

“Why didn’t you?”

“Man’s got responsibilities.”

“But did you _want_ me?” he presses, ice in his stomach, not wanting to hear the answer.  

“Ain’t relevant,” Travis grunts. “Now go put the beans on for supper while I finish this up.”

Years later he will come to understand the brittle mercy of his father’s reticence: he never tells him that he’s a burden.  But Rust knows it all the same.

\---

When Rust is ten Travis teaches him to drive the truck, and from that moment on he is responsible for the groceries: hardtack, canned vegetables, flour and salt and powdered milk.  It’s his job to stretch the crumpled handful of bills Travis gave him as far as they’ll go, and if the food runs out before the money comes in, the fault lies with Rust.   _Plan for winter_ , his old man says, _plan for winter_.  He doesn’t always mean the weather; Travis is constantly readying his son for some unspeakable apocalypse that hasn’t taken shape in his vision quite yet.  The measure of a man, he tells Rust, is in his ability to prepare for the inevitable shitstorm.

Forty years later, Rust stands in a brightly lit supermarket in a southern state, a bit perplexed, as he always is, about having money in his pocket and the option to buy nearly any damn thing in this place that he wants.  “We got any kidney beans at the house?” Marty asks, swinging the basket in one hand.   _The house_ , he always calls it, even though it’s a shitty duplex.

“Three dark red.  Two light red,” Rust replies.  “Two white.”

“Okay, Rain Man,” Marty replies absently, consulting the list in his hand: _onion, garlic, tomato paste_.  He's spent the morning scouring the internet for chili recipes.  

They have twelve cans of beans total, six cans of tuna, seven of soup.  A loaf of bread on the counter, steaks in the freezer, a bowlful of oranges.  All told there’s enough in the kitchen to last the two of them three weeks, four if they ration.  Rust doesn’t say so, though, because he figured out a long time ago that other people don’t keep track of that kind of thing.

With few exceptions--rough, jagged memories that still wake him, cold and sweating, on an odd night (a sickening crash through the ice, an encounter with a large and unusually territorial moose, a couple of his old man’s moonshine-fueled rages), Rust does not remember feeling particularly unsafe as a child.  The worlds of other children, with the sharpest corners swaddled in cotton wool, would have been alien to him. Life made sense out in the bush, or at least the fact that it didn’t make sense had its own internal logic: the weather couldn’t be reasoned with and Travis was Travis, for better or for worse.  But there was always that crushing sense of _responsibility_ \--the knowledge that if he did die out there in the cold, he’d have no one to blame but his own damn fool self.  

“You gotta walk,” Travis said once, when he was five and his legs were going numb.  “No one’s ever gonna carry you.”

As an adult he’ll take things in stride: an obstacle course in basic training, a tricky exam at the police academy, Sophia’s first stomach flu. His knack for being useful in a crisis is generally considered his only redeeming quality.

\---

One night they are lying awake in their respective beds on either side of the back room of the cabin, and snowfall has deadened every other sound in the world but his own breathing and the crackling of sticks in the iron stove, and the question boils over in him.

“What did she look like?”

“She had yellow hair that curled.  Brown eyes.  A smile like a knife.”  Travis rolls over to face the wall.  “Don’t you ask me again.”

\---

There were things there to love, though it will be hard for him to admit until after he has left them behind.  That arctic landscape, simultaneously nothing and everything, that first awoke his cross-wired jumble of senses.  The singing of the stars didn’t start until he was twelve or thirteen, but as a small child he remembered that the bite of snow against his cheeks tasted sour and sharp, like lemons; but the glow of northern lights was rich and sweet like summer berries under his tongue.  The cabin, so cramped and stifling within, was heart-achingly beautiful from a distance, the light behind the translucent windows suffusing the snow with a warm glow that could be seen for miles.  They had a radio that worked about half the time, and some nights his pop would turn it up too loud and play the Shirelles or the Shangri-las, and Rust didn’t mind his singing so much then.  

In the end even these small pleasures were lost.  “I ain’t gotta bother to tell you not to come back,” Travis says as Rust stuffs his enlistment papers into his pocket and his clothes into a duffel bag.  “I know you won’t, anyway.”  

“Pop,” he says helplessly, “we don’t gotta leave it this way.”

“You think this shit is real,” he replies, gesturing at the bag, the clothes, the piles of books and drawings and assorted found objects.  “You think there’s other shit, better shit, out there where it’s warm.  There’s not.  None of it’s real.”

“You’re a crazy old man,” Rust mutters under his breath, shoving his lighter into the pocket of his jeans.

“All a man’s got in this world are his choices,” Travis says.  “You’ve made yours, so be prepared to stand by it.”  It’s the last thing his father ever says to him.


	3. epithalamium

_epithalamium_. a song in anticipation of marriage.

\---

The fact of his pulse,  
the way he pulled his body in, out of shyness or shame or a desire  
not to disturb the air around him.  
Everyone could see the way his muscles worked,  
the way we look like animals,  
his skin barely keeping him inside.  
I wanted to take him home  
and rough him up and get my hands inside him, drive my body into his  
like a crash test car.  
I wanted to be wanted and he was  
very beautiful, kissed with his eyes closed, and only felt good while moving.  
You could drown in those eyes, I said,  
so it’s summer, so it’s suicide,  
so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.  
\--Richard Siken, “Little Beast”

Spring rain, then a night in summer.  
A man’s voice, then a woman’s voice.  
You grew up, you were struck by lightning.  
When you opened your eyes, you were wired forever to your true love.  
It only happened once. Then you were taken care of,  
your story was finished.  
\--Louise Glück, “Prism”

\---

He spends his time in the service in the Northeast, mostly.  It’s milder than Alaska but that ain’t saying much, and by the time packs up to head down to Houston it’s November and he’s afraid he’s missed the summer entirely.  But when he arrives on Thanksgiving Day it’s seventy degrees and sunny; he moves his meager belongings into his new apartment and then strips off his shoes and shirt and lays right there in the weed-choked backyard clad only in his jeans, and the sun feels hard and sharp and pinkish-red against his skin and he starts to laugh so hard his stomach hurts, causing the Rodriguezes upstairs to pause in saying grace over their meal and wonder at the insane cackling coming in through the open window.

Growing up poor and isolated among other poor, isolated children, he had been only vaguely aware of their near-desperate poverty, only a little resentful towards Travis for not just getting a fucking normal job like other people’s fathers.  But here in his own apartment he is almost dizzy with the freedom of having his own space, with no one to answer to for either his asceticism or profligation.  He buys a chipped lamp and a few dishes secondhand, but the pillow and sheets are brand-new, crisp and clean under a glossy layer of plastic.  He takes pleasure in small luxuries his old man couldn’t or wouldn’t provide: matching bedclothes, iced drinks and scaldingly hot showers, fresh fruit.

\---

_There, as [Psyche] wept and trembled, a soft breath of air came through the stillness to her, the gentle breathing of Zephyr, sweetest and mildest of winds.  She felt it lift her up._

\---

Rust knows he is not likable, but he is capable, and it has helped him carve out some small space for himself in the world.  The landlord lets him rent cheap because he knows that the weird gangly kid with lots of books and no furniture will take care of the building’s repairs, snaking drains and setting mousetraps without complaint.  He keeps an ear out for the Rodriguez children, ten and twelve, while their mother runs down to the market; once or twice when she has to work late he feeds them peanut butter sandwiches in his tiny kitchen and gives them paper and charcoal pencils for drawing.  His classmates at the police academy know him as an awkward but useful member of their study groups, who takes good notes and knows the forensics section of the card catalogue backwards and forwards but doesn’t seem to mind that he’s never invited out for beers afterwards.  Claire sometimes worries that he is too boring; he’d rather stay at home than go dancing, doesn’t smoke pot with her because “it makes colors taste strange,” and plans on becoming a cop despite a relative disregard for authority or legality.  But having suffered a string of irresponsible, unemployed, childlike boyfriends, she finds solace in this rough outcropping of a man, far older than his years, who can fix her decrepit Datsun, stand up for her against harassing drunks at a bar, and grill one hell of a burger.

While others his age are flailing over how to open a bank account or make a grocery list, Rust knows how to dress a deer, dress a wound, dress for subzero weather; how to mend a tear in cloth or flesh with needle and thread.  How to cook, how to starve, how not freeze to death, how to kill with a knife, an arrow, a gun.  How to lie to people and tell when people are lying to you.  From his mother he learned that it is easy not love a child, to walk away from it, to leave it to the snow.  Everything else he gets from Travis, and it all boils down to one lesson: children are damn near impossible to keep alive.  

\---

It’s not hot yet, not like it will be in mid-July when it feels like living in a brick oven and the flesh is trying to crawl off your bones; but in early April warm air is already settling over everything like a soft shawl, the air redolent with flowers and stiff with pollen even now, two hours before sunrise.  They have been driving all night to nowhere in particular, and they’re far enough from Houston now that the light pollution has finally seeped out of the sky; the stars stretch out in front of the truck like a canopy of diamonds.  He pulls over on the side of the road, no fucking clue where they are--close enough to the Gulf to smell the sea but not to hear it--and she’s nervous they won’t find their way home again, she always is, but Rust has been lost in his life more times than he’s been found and he’s not worried.

He kicks open the door to the pickup and stretches his legs, hears his knees crack.  “Christ, it’s cold,” she mutters as she descends from the truck; she grew up in Uvalde just a stone’s throw from the border and has no sense of perspective about weather.  Claire has no sense of perspective about most things, which is what he likes best about her.  She feels like crawling into a safe small space and hiding there, though he couldn’t tell you what exactly he’s hiding from.

He takes her hand and helps her up into the truck bed, where they spread out the blankets, authentic and hand-woven in Mexico, identical to every other authentic and handwoven blanket from here to Tijuana.  Blue and green, red and pink, purple and gray; it’s too dark to see the colors but he can feel their trembling, pulsing wavelengths, somehow, in the rough cloth under his shoulderblades and, beneath that, the hard plastic of the bed liner.  He stretches out one long hand and starts to pick out constellations, like he always does, and she burrows her head into his shoulder and pretends to pay attention, like she always does.

He wonders if this is what happiness is: an absence of unpredictability and discomfort.  The way she doesn’t fill up the empty spaces so much as collapse them.  There’s less of him when he’s with her, but he’s whole.

His thoughts are broken up and scattered by the sensation of her lips at his neck.  He doesn’t care too much one way or another; it’s pleasurable enough but somehow uncanny, like she’s turning a switch on somewhere in his body, independent of his brain.  But he wants to please her, to keep her around as long as she’s willing to stay. He's not sure he loves her but he's sure he loves the way she makes him feel, connected to the world by a thousand golden threads.  Loves the way her skin crackles with electricity beneath his touch, her black eyes warm like newly tilled earth, her voice hoarse and sweet like _huajillo_ honey caught in the back of your throat.  He can unfasten her buttons without looking, make her moan without trying.  She wants him, and it’s nice to be what someone wants.

She asked him once why he loved her (he had said it once, weeks before, when he was drunk; he may even have believed it at the time, it may even have been true) and he did not say _there is a buzzing beneath my tongue and it has been there as long as I can remember. it quiets in your presence_ because even he knows you don’t say such things to girls, not even girls with septum piercings and lipstick the color of a bruise, girls who decorate their rooms with _calaveras_ and Siouxsie and the Banshees posters and paintings of skeletal birds rendered in acrylic and glitter and their own blood.  Instead you say _you are pretty. you are clever. you smell like the rain_ ; none of these things are precisely lies.  

Years later he will look back and think of that night, the way she cast her head back and arched her back, her black hair falling between her shoulderblades like rain, her face as round as the moon, the way her scream echoed back against his staggering moan.  He will imagine erasing that moment before it can happen, pushing Claire away before somewhere, deep within her, two small parts can join and twitch into new life.  But it feels like a betrayal of himself, that nervous, long-limbed kid with curls tumbling over his forehead, a boy of only twenty-four who was still becoming accustomed to the feeling of warmth.  

\---

"Rust."

Claire is an Amazonian queen brandishing a long, thin spear of pink plastic, two tell-tale runic lines spelling out his fate.  She looks pissed, as if it’s somehow all his fault, like his sperm are too stubborn to be constrained by the condoms that he jimmies from gas station toilet vending machines.

There’s a knot of ice where his stomach used to be, like when he was a kid and misjudged the frozen surface of a pond too close to spring.  He figures he had maybe a half-dozen close calls like that growing up, another two or three since joining the force, and he’s not arrogant enough to pretend that he wasn’t scared but not like this, never like this.  He can feel tears, hot and desperate, rising up in the back of his throat for the first time since he was very small.  

 _You have to get rid of it_ , he almost says.  She wouldn’t understand, couldn’t, growing up poor like him but surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins, tears and laughter both in abundance, buffeted through dark times by christenings, Sunday dinners, riding thirdhand bikes on sunny streets, never getting what she wanted but always what she needed--how could she understand the wild and wintry images that the word _family_ calls up in him?  What the everloving fuck does he know about loving a child?

In years to come he’ll wonder whether he should have made an ultimatum, what it might have altered, whether it would have been an act of bravery or of cowardice.  But his heart is in his throat, choking him, and anyway what good would it do?  How could he say such a thing to Claire, whose leather jacket is studded with women’s lib buttons but who always begs off when her friends invite her to a pro-choice rally, Claire with the _veladores_ that she pretends are ironic and the rosary beneath her pillow that she thinks her atheist boyfriend doesn’t know about, Clareta Lucia Gutierrez baptized and confirmed at Our Lady of Refuge--he knows what she would say: _benedicta tu in mulieribus_ and all that.  She’s all he has, a small warm refuge from the shitstorm inside his head, the only goddamn person on the face of the earth who has ever _wanted_ him around

so instead he says “I’ll marry you, if you want.”  


	4. amphidromia

_amphidromia_. a celebration of the birth of a child.

\---

Surrendered blind to his embrace,  
You dared not look.  A human voice,  
You thought.   You never had a choice.  
Perhaps a monster, face to face,  
With scales and fangs and leathern wings.  
What of the fetus that you carry?  
For certain it is human?  Very?  
Doubt burns like hot wax; it stings.  
Doubt burns.  Like hot wax, it stings.  
For certain, it is human, very.  
What of the fetus that you carry,  
With scales and fangs and leathern wings  
Perhaps?  A monster.  Face to face,  
You thought you never had a choice,  
You dared not.  

\--A.E. Stallings, “Three Poems to Psyche (The Eldest Sister to Psyche)”

\---

When Claire is six months pregnant he moves them into the little house at the end of West Sparrow Lane, because he’s not going to let a child grow up in one cramped room like he did, even though he has to pull double overtime to afford it.  There are two bedrooms, a tiny den, a screened-in porch with a view of the blind curve where cars come too fast over rough, potholed pavement.  

They begin to acquire things: secondhand throw pillows, mismatched dishes, bits of furniture.  Claire never found an empty space she didn’t want to fill; every piece of trash is a would-be art project.  He finds it amusing at first, the childlike potential she sees in everything, but soon he’s waiting until she’s asleep and then throwing things away.  

Worst of all are the keepsakes.  That’s what the shoeboxes lining the closets say in her messy, lefthanded scrawl: _keepsakes_.  One holding her christening gown, a faded photograph of her grandmother, a broken teacup once belonging to a great-aunt; another filled with ticket stubs, yarn bracelets knotted by grade-school friends, liner notes to music by bands whose lyrics had meant something to her once.  The sight of them stacked precariously next to his toolbox and police uniforms makes him inexplicably nervous; he begs her to get rid of them.  “Haven’t you ever wanted to hold on to anything?” she asks.  

He can’t remember a time when such a desire was relevant.  Travis was unflinchingly unsentimental; when Rust outgrew the clothes he wore from Texas as a toddler and his baby blanket was too threadbare to keep out the cold, they were converted to rags for the kitchen and shed.  One winter, when he was thirteen and they were snowed in for a week without enough kindling, Travis burned--among several of his own meager possessions--the teddy bear Rust had treasured as a child and a notebook of his drawings, though he did not touch his son’s treasured horde of mostly-stolen books.    _Anything that cannot perform its assigned task must be melted down and reshaped into something else, he used to say._

The vodka-soaked night they met, Rust brought Claire back to his apartment and the next morning she pulled her ever-present Polaroid camera from her corduroy satchel and took a photo of herself wearing only his Houston Police Academy cap, then scrawled her phone number across it with purple eyeliner and stuck it to his front door with chewed-up gum.  There’s a box for that picture, the numbers now smudged and smeared across her naked thighs like a bruise, along with the rubberband she used to pull back her hair the first time she went down on him, a shotglass she stole from the bar on their second date, a dessicated moth she found on his windowsill with a wing pattern like a death’s head.  She tears pages from his sketch pad, his library books, his favorite volume of poetry and uses multicolored thread to sew them together into a makeshift book, then buys herself roses and presses them between the pages.  

The box is heavy and tangible; when you pick it up you can feel the items shift and roll as if they are real.  He knows they are only sand and paper and dust, as ephemeral as this thing between them: desire withered like a late-autumn leaf, a fragile promise growing within her, a green thread that will bind them together.

\---

_She was floating away from the rocky hill and down until she lay upon a grassy meadow soft as a bed of flowers. She woke beside a bright river; and on its band was a mansion stately and beautiful as though built for a god, with pillars of gold and walls of silver and floors inlaid with precious stones. No sound was to be heard; the place seemed deserted and Psyche drew near, awestruck at the sight of such splendor._

\---

“Sometimes I think you’re one of those guys who doesn’t even believe in love,” Claire says, pretending to be half-asleep so the words will fall soft.  Such things were always bright patches of oilslick rainwater running between them, a gentle promise to let each other go when the time came, and he would have thought nothing of those words last spring.  But they’re dangerous now that the year is sloughing off the last of its skin and Claire, who Rust is pretty sure has never owned so much as a watch or a clock radio her whole life, has already purchased a 1987 calendar and circled the due date there on the first page.

It’s not that he doesn’t believe in love, not exactly.  It’s just that terms and conditions always apply; what romantics call _relationship_ is just an uneasy dance, a weighing of one’s need against the limitations of another’s patience.  He does not expect anyone to love him forever, or to love anyone forever himself.   _Plan for winter._

In January that changes.

He gropes for words to explain what he's feeling, even to himself, but it soars up away from him like the sky on a black and starless night.  He had belonged to Travis in many ways, but he can’t imagine his father had any such delicate feelings to unfurl for his gangly, awkward offspring; Rust was a stranger he hadn’t expected or wanted, and he was compelled to fatherhood by the sense of obligation that hung on him like a shroud.   He won’t begrudge the old man whatever expression of love he was able to give, but they were a duet of off-key instruments, a mosaic of broken pieces, ill-fit together.  But his love for Sophia shoves him down and knocks the wind out of him; he feels his lungs expand until they creak and he fears they will give way under the pressure.  He’s struck with sheer terror at the very idea of his love for her, and is almost angry at her for the trembling weakness she engenders in him; but the feeling passes like a melting scrim of ice, and he wants to curl around her as a snake curls around a warm stone.  Her cheeks are the most perfect undertone of pink that’s ever existed.  He doesn’t care if he never sees another color again for the rest of his life.  

“I’m not going to fuck this up,” he whispers, pulling the tiny bundle close to his chest.  

“Hey, fuckhead,” Claire says drowsily from the hospital bed.  “Don’t say fuck around the baby.”

\---

_They had learned, they said, and knew for a fact, that her husband was not a man, but the fearful serpent Apollo's oracle had declared he would be. He was kind now, no doubt, but he would certainly turn upon her some night and devour her. Psyche felt terror flooding her heart instead of love._

\---

He works the late hours others won’t, the cases no one else wants, making himself indispensable because that’s always how he’s dealt with the panic-inducing tarantella of social bonds: no one really likes Detective Cohle, but they need him, so they keep him around.  And he needs them to keep him around, because he can’t just live in the back of his truck when the world throws him out on his ass like he might have a few years ago.  Now there is the house on West Sparrow to think of, with its warm breezes barely moved by a lazy ceiling fan, food in the pantry and clothes on her back, $300 including utilities, painstakingly counted out and left on the kitchen table in an untidy pile of fives and tens on the first of every month.  The best thing he can do for her--the only thing he knows how to do for her--is to keep the paychecks coming that maintain that cocoon of safety.  He comes home at dawn most mornings to lift her from crib to high chair and give her breakfast, button her into her dress and comb her hair; he only sees Claire when she’s getting out of their bed and he’s getting into it and he tries not to think about how little that bothers him.

That’s why he isn’t home when it happens, at 3:30 on a Saturday.  He’s on a stakeout, gone two and a half days, and he doesn’t call or check in because there is no ice to bend or break beneath your feet in the house on West Sparrow Lane and he makes the mistake of confusing warmth with safety.  He lets his guard down.  His father never would have done that.  


	5. sparagmos

_sparagmos_. to tear apart a living body as a sacrifice.

\---

In the first version, Persephone  
is taken from her mother  
and the goddess of the earth  
punishes the earth—this is  
consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction  
in doing harm, particularly  
unconscious harm:  
we may call this  
negative creation.  
\--Louise Glück, “Persephone the Wanderer”

Me and my man, we tried a spell,  
A pharmacopeia of charms,  
And yet…  When I am lonesome, well,  
I rock the still-borns in my arms.  
This place is dead—a real dive.  
We’re past all twists, rewards and perils.  
But what the hell.  We all arrive.  
Here, have some pomegranate arils.  
I heard an old wive’s tale above  
When I was a girl with a girl’s treasure.  
The story went, Soul married Love  
And they conceived, and called her Pleasure.  
In Anhedonia we take  
Our bitters with hypnotic waters.  
The dawn’s always about to break  
But never does.  We dream of daughters.  
\--A.E. Stallings, “Three Poems to Psyche (Persephone to Psyche)”

\---

“Don’t say I wasn’t watching her.”  Claire doesn’t look at him.  Her gaze is firmly affixed to the window, which has nothing to show but the blank brick wall of an adjacent hospital wing.  Later, he will try to remember if she ever looked him in the eyes again, after.

(“I hope the baby has your eyes,” she’d said once, maybe four or five months in when her belly was beginning to press noticeably against her faded t-shirts.  “Don’t say that,” he replied.  He has Travis’s eyes, piercing and restless and half-mad.)

He’s looking at the lime-popsicle peaks and valleys of heart monitor, counting between the beats to measure their steadiness, so focused he forgets what Claire has said for a moment.  “I wasn’t going to.”  He does occasionally have a little awareness intercepting between mouth and brain, after all, so even if he’d been thinking it he wouldn’t have said it, and he hadn’t been thinking it at all.  Claire’s mother blames the driver and Claire, unreasonably but characteristically, blames the tire company, but Rust considers blaming anyone but yourself a flaw of character.  

By five or six Rust had learned how find a path in the snow, how to watch the trail to keep from tripping and falling, how to wash and dress his knee if he did fall, which berries would keep you alive if your leg gave way beneath you and which would purge you if you’d picked the wrong ones.  But Claire had been a normal child, a wrapped-in-cotton-wool child--not what you’d think of as _pampered_ , exactly, money was too tight for that, but the only girl after generations of boys, surrounded by doting tias and abuelas, and he’s pretty sure she got through childhood without so much as a skinned knee.  It’s what drew her to Rust, after all--Rust who refused to coddle her, who made her feel tough and capable like the girls on her punk-rock posters.  She’d never learned to scan the horizon for cars coming too fast around the bend, never calculated the precise algebra of blowout and skid and crash before putting Sophia on her tricycle in the driveway, _their_ driveway, because if you pay $300 a month for something it’s _yours_ and therefore _safe_.  

Rust knows that Travis was not a good man and in many ways he was not a good father, but for him to raise a child in that time, in that place, was nothing short of a miracle.   _That crazy fuck kept me alive out in the ass end of nowhere_ , Rust thinks as the bright green peaks of his daughter’s life start to dwindle into foothills, and _I can’t even keep a kid alive in the fucking suburbs._

\---

Later, at North Shore, they will speak of relapse and genetics, of inevitability and disease, of chemical hooks in his brain as unavoidable as his height or the waves in his hair.  He wishes he could believe it, could wash his hands of himself like Pilate, relinquish control over his own fuckups and give it all over to an invisible God that nudges him onto the wagon and knocks him off again with one careless, almighty finger.  But the truth is that he has always stood at the edges of volcanoes and gazed into them levelly, fighting the urge to toss himself in as easy as you’d dispose of a cigarette; to demand of himself, as he once asked his father, _but did you want me?_ \--knowing he will not like the answer.

That is the worst part, afterwards: the knowledge that he went into this with his eyes open and never considered himself worth preserving.

\---

_In her first shame at her folly and lack of faith, Psyche fell on her knees and would have plunged the knife into her own breast if it had not fallen from her trembling hands. But those same unsteady hands that saved her betrayed her, too, for as she hung over him, ravished at the sight of him and unable to deny herself the bliss of filling her eyes with his beauty, some hot oil fell from the lamp upon his shoulder. He started awake: he saw the light and knew her faithlessness, and without a word he fled from her._

\---

He’s hungover beside the impossibly tiny casket as the priest drones on and on about eternal peace, with a pounding headache and three long red scratches, half-healed, spiraling down the side of his face.  That was two nights ago, when Claire’s mother let slip that they were having a Catholic ceremony, and said he’d be damned if he was going to let them plant her in the backyard of any God who’d allow this to happen.   _She never even set foot inside a church a day in her life_ , Rust protested, as if the religious convictions of a dead two-year-old are somehow relevant.  Claire and her mother exchanged a nervous glance, and that’s how he discovered that eight weeks after her birth, while he was off investigating a string of pawn-shop robberies, Claire had finally been worn down by her mother’s insistence and had taken Sophia to be christened at Capilla La Divina Providencia.

He said some things he’d regret later if he could remember them (it seems awkward, after the fact, to ask), and woke the next morning to find redblack gouges tracing the line of his cheekbone, the spaces between them in perfect proportion to the ones he used to twine his fingers through on long, slow, hot nights.  

It’s mid-June and whiskey-scented sweat is pouring off his brow and stinging the still-tender wounds on his cheek, and one of Claire’s aunts begins to wail, Rust can’t remember her name, she came over on Sundays about once a month to feed her great-niece divinity and put ribbons in her hair but whose life will, truth be told, continue on much as it had before in Sophia’s absence.  Claire, drugged to the gills on some cocktail a PICU nurse slipped her, makes an occasional sniffling noise and sways uncertainly.  Rust does not weep: it’s something people do for the benefit of others and he doesn’t have anyone to impress.

They lead Claire away to the car, and Valera glares at her son-in-law.  “Go to your wife,” she says through clenched teeth.  He admires her ability to uphold the social contract, given the circumstances.  “She needs you.”

He tries to remember the last time he asked for comfort; he was probably three or four.  “No one needs anyone,” he says flatly, watching the coffin descend.  “Just habit.  She’ll get over it.”

\---

That night, after Claire’s dry sobs have eased off into silence, he scoops her discarded dress off the floor and rifles through the pockets until he finds the bottle of tiny blue tablets, each with a fragile empty _V_ hollowing out the center.  He sits on their bedroom floor, pours the pills into his palm and puts them under his tongue to dissolve, one at a time, until his vision has sufficiently blurred before him.  Headlights from passing cars cut through the window and flicker before his eyes, damnable cars on that damnable road, and he feels himself rocking back and forth to the rhythm of their danse macabre the way he swayed beneath the spell of his first taste of liquor years ago.  

He thinks about the leukemia story, the one he’ll use to cover his tracks six years down the line, and the story won’t be bullshit, not exactly--it’s just not his story.  The only thing Rust knows about the upper branches of his family tree is that his father’s father was diagnosed with leukemia in the summer of 1960 and Travis joined the army to help pay the medical bills, and in the end it hadn’t done a damn bit of good; while his son was off shooting dope and losing his grip on reality somewhere north of Dắk Tô, Peter Cohle had died anyway, a slow, ugly, undignified death in a hospital in Nacogdoches.

(“Not me,” Travis would say, running a whetstone slowly over the blade of his hatchet.  “My time comes, I’m gonna walk out where no one can find me.  Let the crows pick me clean.”  Rust always wanted to ask his old man how he’d know exactly when his time is, like he’s a fucking elephant or something, but he really didn’t want to hear Travis’s theories on the matter.  He wonders if it went down like his pop had planned.  He’d called up along the North Slope borough in the week following her birth--he wasn’t sure why; it’s not like his old man would have been happy at the news.   _The last thing this world needs is more fuckin’ people, son_.  It took eight calls before someone would tell him that no one had seen Travis since a couple of months after Rust stepped on that Army bus in Barrow.)

He thinks of the cancer that had chewed up his grandfather’s marrow and sent his only son off to fight in a war that had chewed up his mind because Travis had a responsibility, always fucking _responsibility_ , and that poison had seeped into Rust and kept him working those long hours away from home because that was all he had to give her, the family flaw that had traveled down the line and finally chewed up his little girl and spat her back out on the pavement, broken and bleeding.  But perhaps it’s for the best, because their line has died out now and there’s no one left to get hurt by Rust’s shitty choices.  No one but Claire, and let’s face it: there had been a ticking time bomb imbedded in her breast since long before this.  

There's only one person in the world he's ever loved out of more than duty, only one who could have, perhaps, persisted in loving him back in spite of himself.  And she’s gone now.  

\---

_When she came into Aphrodite’s presence the goddess laughed aloud and asked her scornfully if she was seeking a husband since the one she had had would have nothing to do with her because he had almost died of the burning wound she had given him. "But really," she said, "you are so plain and ill-favored a girl that you will never be able to get you a lover except by the most diligent and painful service. I will therefore show my good will to you by training you in such ways."_

\---

They offer him paid personal leave; instead they find him at his desk all hours of the day and night, black marks like bruises under his eyes, chewing caffeine pills and alphabetizing files no one’s looked at in years.  “He’s creepin’ me out,” the captain of Robbery says, and Narco figures they can use someone with a stellar work ethic, no apparent need for sleep, and a haunted junkie stare.  No one realizes what a spectacularly bad idea this is, except perhaps for Rust, who’s on the job two and a half days before he trades in pills for powders.  Even so, he gets his collars more often than not.  This is the only thing he’s good at.

He knows now that whatever was in him that might have been worth anything has gone underground to rot, and whatever’s left is a mindless, howling chaos, caustic and insane, madder than his father and crueler than his mother.  It’s going to fuck up everything in its path, and he will not have the strength to fight it off.  

\---

“I wanted to leave.  A lot.”  Her voice is a slow, drugged drone, like bees buzzing.  He’s so drunk he can’t open his eyes, but he can see her voice behind his eyelids, a sick yellow electrical charge.  “I even made plans. Two or three times.”

“That’s bullshit,” he says, though he’s not sure whether he’s speaking out loud.  “You never planned for a thing in your goddamn life.”

“But there was always her,” she continues.  He can smell where the joint has tumbled from between her fingers and is working its smoldering way through the carpet.  He hopes the house burns down with them in it.  “And you loved her.  You were empty and that was the only real thing inside you, your love for her.  So I stayed.”  Claire rolls over and he hears her voice grow muffled as she buries her face into the arm of the chair.  “Maybe it’s good she’s gone.  I can get away from you now.”

The last thing he thinks before sliding into unconsciousness is that tomorrow, when he’s sobered up a little, he will wrap his hands around her throat and strangle her to death for saying that.  But the next morning he’s too preoccupied with puking and she no longer seems worth the effort.

After, when he thinks of Claire, he will think of her cupid’s-bow mouth, outlined in dark lipstick.  It got all over everything: stuck to drinking glasses like tar, smudged into Sophia’s hairline, left bruise-colored stains on his skin.  She liked his torso best: to place her mouth just below the curve of his hipbone, outline his ribs.  After he’s shot in Port Houston he’ll run his fingertips over the holes and imagine her mouth against the wounds, draining his blood until he’s a dry husk.

\---

She must have been packing for days.  There’s a lot left behind--all those fucking shoeboxes of meaningless nostalgic hoarder bullshit, for starters (the contents of the shoebox labeled _Rust_ are scattered in the backyard, the box itself ripped to shreds), but there's a lot missing, too: makeup, cassette tapes, the scarves she looped around her neck any time the temperature dipped below seventy. Empty hangers clatter and clack like bones.  He wonders how could have missed it, how long it's been since he was home, what fucking day it is.

Sophia’s room is just bare, as if nothing was ever there. He finds her clothes and crib and stuffed animals in a dumpster two streets over.  Letting his legs collapse beneath him, he slides down into the street, leans his head back and lets the heat from the sun-baked metal beat into his scalp.  

He doesn’t remember a whole lot after that, and he’s not sure it’s because of the drugs.  He thinks maybe a part of him just crawled away, like a weak, small animal hiding in a dark cave.  But when he wakes in a jail cell, his first thought is, _you put yourself here, asshole_.  The thought is more comforting that you’d think: this is the last predictable corner of the world.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The tire/blowout stuff is in reference to the [1.02 script](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwPsOUEDLfXPcTBSckxwUFZFRWc/edit?usp=sharing), which says Sophia's accident was the result of a blowout.


	6. agathusia

_agathusia_.  to sacrifice oneself for the greater good.

\---

The terrible reunions in store for her  
will take up the rest of her life.  
When the passion for expiation  
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose  
the way you live. You do not live;  
you are not allowed to die.  
\--Louise Glück, “Persephone the Wanderer”

Try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this—  
swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood  
on the first four knuckles.  
We pull our boots on with both hands  
but we can’t punch ourselves awake and all I can do  
is stand on the curb and say _Sorry_  
_about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine._  
I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.  
\--Richard Siken, "Little Beast"

It is pointed out, regularly and endlessly, that the word “monster” shares roots with “ _monstrum_ ,” “ _monstrare_ ,” “ _monere_ “—”that which teaches,” “to show,” “to warn.” This is true but no longer of any help at all, if it ever was.  
\--China Miéville, “Theses on Monsters”

\---

“From this point on,” McKenna says, “we own your ass.”  Rust tilts his head back, feeling a nosebleed about to start, and thinks about the illusion of freedom: the way his father thought if he could just push hard enough against the world it would disappear, whether his mother thought she was escaping _to_ something when she left him, or just _from_.  He’s not sure which perspective is the shittiest, but he wonders--just philosophically, you understand--what it would be like to belong to someone who wants you.

He knows now that every last bridge is burned, that he is free of all the worn and fraying threads that bound his heart to the world.  He has tried to be a good cop, a good father, a good husband, a good son, and he has failed spectacularly on all counts.  But all that is done now and the thing he’s morphing into will feel no need to wear domesticity like a shroud and polite conversation like an ill-fitting suit.  If that makes him a marionette, well, let them jerk on his strings; he doesn’t care.  This particular dance is the only one he was ever any good at.

\---

_Obediently as always Psyche went forth to look for the road to Hades._

\---

“You seem to be adjusting well,” Morales says.  “Tattoo’s a nice touch.  It real?”

The dead bird was something he saw in the snow once, when he was four or five.  Its tiny talons were curled like a child’s hands; it had drab bluebrown feathers that stirred a little in the winter breeze.  “All flesh is grass,” Travis intoned, and it seemed an odd thing to say, for it was February, the world buried in ice, and Rust was still young enough to worry that bright green warmth might never return.  But by May the snow was seeping off the world in rivulets and one morning in June he was pulling his little red wagon out to the edge of the woods to gather the kindling that would see them through the next winter and that’s when he saw what was left of the bird: a fragile structure of pearl-white bones against dark green summer growth, a single periwinkle poking up through one eye-socket.

The bird on his arm is skeletal but feathered still, screeching, undead.  It is a terrible, liminal thing, unable to rest, the flesh stripped from its bones but its wings forcing it ever forward.  Rust blinks slowly.  “Of course it’s fucking real,” he says.

“It’s hard for most guys,” Morales continues, dumping aspartame into his coffee.  That’s his new thing, low-calorie sweetener.  He has these phases; Rust vaguely remembers something about oat bran muffins during the Tamaulipas thing, low-fat cookies in little green packages during the El Paso thing.  He’s not real clear on time these days, so he measures everything in jobs.  

He ignores his handler and gulps down acidic black coffee in a greasy white mug.  Morales is always telling him how hard working UC is, due to his fifteen years of experience drinking coffee across tables from guys who are working UC.  

“You’re always two things at once,” he continues.  “Even when you’re in the middle of it, no contact with your old life--”

Rust suspects Morales is bothered by how easily his charge has taken to it, but his leather might as well be draped around a papier-mache form on a wire skeleton; there’s no self left to repress.  He stares back at Morales in a way he knows people find unnerving. “I don’t have an old life,” he says tonelessly.  

Morales looks away.  “All I’m saying is, every thought in your head, every move, you can’t react like you would.  You gotta ask yourself: _what would my profile do_?  You know, like those stupid bracelets the Jesus freaks is wearin’ these days.”

“Ain’t like that,” he replies, balls a napkin up in his fist, and gets up to leave without explaining the funeral pyre he’s built of himself and or the fucked-up phoenix that’s risen from the flames.

Sometimes he thinks, _what would Rust do?_  Then he usually does the opposite.

\---

You can go without anything if you have to, and having survived its loss, you learn it’s easier just to open your hands and let it trickle out before it gets wrenched from your grasp.  It takes practice, like anything else, but he’s had lots of practice.  His father trained him up in it--how you read your way through a maddeningly dull winter, how to ground yourself in detail when you lost your way in the woods and started to panic.  “Just don’t think about it,” he’d say, when hunger pains hit and they were still a day or so away from the pause in snowfall that would let them hunt.  

So that’s what he does for four years. Deliberately, painstakingly, he doesn’t think about Sophia.  He rids himself of her weight in his arms for the first time, the tottering first steps he wasn’t there to see but Claire captured on her Polaroid, the way her eyes were sunk beneath her brow as she lay in the hospital bed.  

At North Shore they miss the point when they thumb through his file, shine a light in his wild, dilated eyes, and conclude _substance abuse is your way of not dealing with unresolved grief_  (it’s the admitting physician at Port Houston who gets it right: _if my job required me to keep from shitting my pants while someone’s face got cut off right in front of me, I’d probably eat speed for breakfast too_ ).  But the drugs certainly help: whatever scraps are left--a shoe, a giggle, the glint of sunlight on her hair--he’s able to lose in a hot white chemical cloud.

\---

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Morales says, “to go storming the gates like that.”  They’re in a Port Houston diner and Morales is eating bacon and eggs.  Some new bullshit about how bread is sugar and sugar is bad.  

Crash drags his eyes away from the window.  “It’s really cute and all,” he says slowly, “the way you manage to make sympathetic noises in just the right spots in the conversation.”

“Cohle--”

“Look, you don’t give a fuck.  I don’t give a fuck.  This is the job.  So do what I do and do your fucking job.”  He has a screaming headache.  He keeps forgetting to eat, lately.

“You’re gonna get yourself killed.”

“Yeah, well, look me in the eye and tell me that wasn’t the plan.”

“What the fuck are you saying, man?”

“Just that they didn’t want the scandal of throwin’ my ass in jail,” he says, lighting a cigarette, “and they couldn’t afford to look weak by letting me off the hook.  This is easier.”

“You sound paranoid, Cohle.  Maybe you should lay off the crank.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”  He hates that word, _paranoid_ ; it brings back bad memories of a childhood spent as the still center of an ideological whirlwind, the only thing keeping Travis more or less on the grid and vaguely tethered to reality.  His teachers made vague noises about Child Services, but Crazy Old Cohle kept the kid fed and clothed and you can’t take a man’s son away just because he says weird things about the President, the military and, on occasion, weather balloon crashes somewhere down in New Mexico. “I’m just saying that anything that cannot perform its assigned task must be melted down and reshaped into something else.”

“What the fuck’s that mean?”

“Nothing.  Something I heard once.  Means they’re gonna use me up ‘til they’re done with me and they’ll give a sigh of relief when I’m gone.”  He finishes his coffee in a gulp and stands up.  “I ain’t bothered by it, brother.  No reason for you to be.”

\---

The sound of the heart monitor is the first thing to cross his consciousness ( _is Sophia dead yet?_ ) and he can sense, though he cannot yet see, that digital scribe scratching out his fate in stuttering, uncertain sour-lime peaks and valleys.  “That was a close one,” the doctor says, leaning over him.  “But you’ve been given a second chance.  Looks like you could survive damn near anything.”

It’s the cruelest thing anyone’s ever said to him, and he wants to reach up and choke the life out of the sonofabitch.  But he’s strapped to the bed.

\---

_Psyche, the all-beautiful, sat sad and solitary, only admired, never loved._

\---

He wills it to slow or stop but _beep. beep. beep. beep, beep, beep_ ; his breath is hitching in his chest and there’s gunfire chattering in his head, _beep-beep-beep-beep_ , he counts the seconds in between until they blur into a senseless metallic tattoo, fasterfasterfaster, there are tubes running out of his side and gaping holes over his ribs, he wants to reach in and pull his insides out but he’s still strapped down, _beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep_

A faceless white dress stabs something into his arm and the creatures clawing at his throat slink away, growling resentfully.  “We’re grateful for your service to the force,” the empty charcoal suits hovering over him intone, like oracles: “but you need a rest.”

\---

_Accordingly Apollo said that Psyche, dressed in deepest mourning, must be set on the summit of a rocky hill and left alone . . . . On the high hilltop in the darkness Psyche sat, waiting for she knew not what terror._

\---

McKenna and Morales are sitting across from him in the common room, their words flitting in and out between the edges of the things that Rust sees behind them: shadows like angular bats, vivid and blackviolet, opening and closing above his former colleagues’ heads.  One of the shadows has the flat, glassy eyes of an antique doll, and he’s pretty sure it’s planning to swoop down and bite a chunk out of McKenna’s throat.  Rust doesn’t warn him, though, because fuck that guy.

Travis saw things sometimes, too.  He had seven tabs of acid on the backs of American-flag stamps, left over from his army days.  He took them once a year, always in the spring, in celebration of some anniversary with mysterious origins.  He’d stand out behind the cabin, naked before a black and endless sky, his back a Rorschach of burn scars and bullet-grazes.  He’d raise his arms high above his head and holler about bodies hanging from unseen palm trees, their guts festooning the branches like ribbons, while the snow-dotted pines before him swayed in silent assent.  Then he’d run around the cabin for an hour or more, singing “Luang Prabang” in off-key and increasingly hysterical tones.

McKenna and Morales say the word _pension_ a lot without saying the word _psych_.  A commendation, they say with uneasy smiles: thanks so much but get the fuck out.  He just tilts his head back to watch the shadows pulse and softly begins to sing those words he’d heard echoing outside the cabin every April: “ _when I came back from Luang Prabang I didn’t have a thing where my balls used to hang, but I got a wooden medal and a fine harangue and now I’m a fucking hero_.”  They don’t look at him when they leave.  The bat-things fold their wings and retreat, gibbering quietly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can hear "Luang Prabang" [here](https://youtu.be/_w5JlDn9WCw).


	7. saprophage

_saprophage_.  organism that feeds on dead or decaying matter.

\---

And me so skinless I could no longer be naked  
And me I had to de-banshee  
And me I dressed myself  
I made a poison suit  
I darned it out of myths  
Some of the myths were beautiful  
Some turned ugly in the making . . . .  
The myth of me and who I must become  
The myth of what I am not  
And the horses who are no myth  
How they do not need to turn Pegasus  
They are winged in their un-myth  
They holy up the ground  
I must holy up the ground  
I sanctify the ground and say fuck it  
I say fuck it in a way that does not invite death  
I say fuck it and fall down no new holes  
And I ride an unwinged horse  
And I unbecome myself  
And I strip my poison suit  
And wear my crown of fuck its  
\--Melissa Broder, “Lunar Shatters”

Someone like me doesn’t escape. I think you sleep awhile,  
then you descend into the terror of the next life  
\--Louise Glück, “Thrush”

\---

“See, this is it, man,” the purple-haired tattoo artist three blocks down from Canal Street assures him, sketching wobbly triangles and coptic crosses on an ash-stained pad.  “That part’s oxygen, that part’s iron.   _Rust_.  Far out, right?   _Alchemy_ , man.  It’s some medieval shit or something, like, some evil wizard shit.  Some people don’t wanna fuck around with it, figure they’ll get hexed or something, but you don’t look like you scare easy.”

Guy’s high as a kite and the symbol could mean anything or, most likely, nothing, but Rust doesn’t care; he’s two weeks out of North Shore and he’s having a hard time remembering his own name.  He’s hoping the persistent itch of ink in his skin will help remind him.  

It’s feeling very apt these days, his name.  You need oxygen and iron to breathe, to build, to create new life and new things.  But he is neither; he is an unfortunate side effect, the corrosive grime that’s left when everything useful has been eaten up.  At North Shore he worked, deliberately and carefully, at dismantling Crash, knocking out screws of the war-machine until it collapsed and lay in on the ground in a heap of greasy, useless parts.  Then they swept the whole mess out on the front lawn, said _rebuild_ , and locked the door behind him, and now he’s sitting here with a wrench in one blistered hand, poking through the grime-encrusted scrap with the other, thinking _what the fuck am I supposed to do with this shit_.

“There’s what’s belongs to others, what belongs to the land, and what belongs to you,” Travis used to say when he planted peas or skinned a deer.  “What belongs to others is none of your concern, and what belongs to the land you may hold in trust for only so long.  But what belongs to you is your responsibility and always will be.”  When he put her in the ground he thought, _well, she must have belonged to the land, then_ ; and for the next four years he was able to pretend that was true.  But now he sees her in everything: pink sunsets, dappled sunlight, clear water.  At night he lies on his mattress while an unspeakable eight-millimeter film plays across his vision.

 _Eyes front_ , the North Shore chaplain used to say. _Remember Lot’s wife. Nothing grows in salt_.  

But Rust is a lachrymatory, an urn, a mauseoleum vase filled with dead flowers.  He looks back and is transformed into a tall tower, fragile and bitter and caustic; he crumbles himself between his palms and salts the earth.  He will let nothing take root in him, ever again.

\---

_There, as she wept and trembled, a soft breath of air came through the stillness to her, the gentle breathing of Zephyr, sweetest and mildest of winds.  She felt it lift her up._

_\---_

Crash had always ended up sleeping in the corner of someone else’s motel room, and Houston PD wasn’t willing to spring for a private room at North Shore.  He has vague memories of a trundle bed in his mother’s one-room apartment; the cabin had one room for sleeping and one for everything else.  When at eleven he started to become concerned about privacy his pop had allowed him to string up a curtain of sorts around his bed and dresser and piles of books, but it blocked the heat from the iron stove between their beds and in the end he’d taken it down and let Travis use the cloth to patch up blankets.

When he first reached Texas, he put his meager boxes down in the middle of the empty one-room apartment and swore he’d never share a space with another human being ever again.  But in the end the choice wasn’t his to make; two months later Claire had begun to insinuate herself, a lipstick here, a lighter there, a battered biography of Frida Kahlo.  He'd wake up to her brewing strong coffee at three in the morning, singing “Boys Don’t Cry” and dancing around the kitchen wearing panties and one of his shirts, her hair a messy blueblack tangle.  And then Sophia moved in, in a manner of speaking, and that was that.  So they moved into the house on West Sparrow, close and warm like the inside of a mouth--Claire hated air conditioning, it was _unnatural_ , she said.  So’s fucking penicillin, he thought, but he let it slide; Claire had a lot of stupid fucking ideas but they bore enough similarity to his pop’s stupid fucking ideas that the annoyance was almost a comfort.  Anyway, the heat wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.  Took him damn near five years in Texas before he felt thawed out.

Having inhabited both the northmost and southmost latitudes of the United States, Rust now cultivates a neutral zone standing in defiant equal opposition to them both.  The apartment is 72°.  He rarely uses the stove or the phone and most of the outlets are untouched, but summer and winter the thermostat is constant.  It’s his only luxury.

(“It’s fuckin’ roasting up there.  You know that heat rises, yeah?” Marty will say during the long, hot summer of Ledoux, the summer he was kicked out of his own home and his own bed; he’ll reach toward the thermostat, muttering something about his ass sticking to the goddamn inflatable mattress, and Rust will slap his hand away with a little more force than he’d intended.)

By the time he reaches Louisiana he owns very little, enough to easily fit in the back of the truck he buys before leaving Houston.  He cashes his last check with Texas PD, picks up a new mattress in Baton Rouge, some TV dinners, coffee grounds. Three days before he goes back on the job he realizes he doesn’t have a damn thing to wear; his work uniform for the past half-decade has been grease-stained boots, a smoldering cigarette, gunpowder-scented driving gloves.  He goes to a thrift store and fills a plastic bag with soft beige, faded brown, midnight blue--unobtrusive shades that don’t put odd tastes in his mouth and shrill notes in his head.  He realizes his fingers can’t quite remember what to do with his tie.  He goes to the hardware store and contemplates paint and wallpaper, always leaving empty-handed and slightly dizzy, and in the end whittles the space down to nothing: bed, crucifix, bare walls.  He feels like a spider very carefully building a cocoon of cool white silk around himself and if everyone would just leave him the fuck alone for awhile then sooner or later he could emerge stronger and more colorful and--

 _that’s butterflies, fucknuts_ , says the voice in his head that sometimes sounds like Morales, sometimes his pop, _and I don’t see you metamorphosin’ into anything that pretty anytime soon_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can see the alchemical symbols for air and iron [here](http://www.mylespaul.com/gallery/data/500/alchemist_symbols.jpg)\--obviously not an exact match, but close enough for my "the tattoo artist fucked up" headcanon. (Also, I really wanted to turn that part into a Harry Potter reference, but the timeline's about three years too early for it.)


	8. hemimetabolism

_hemimetabolism_.  an incomplete metamorphosis.

\---

A disaster like this  
leaves no mark on the earth.  
And people like that — they think it gives them  
a fresh start.  
\--Louise Glück, "Averno"

Mirrors and shop windows returned our faces to us,  
replete with the tight lips and the eyes that remained eyes  
and not the doorways we had hoped for.  
His wounds healed, the skin a bit thicker than before,  
scars like train tracks on his arms and on his body underneath his shirt.  
\--Richard Siken, "Little Beast"

\---

Before he learns the codes unique to Louisiana State CID’s radio dispatch, the combination to his locker, or which Coke machine in the lobby only works if you kick it, Rust learns about 2 p.m.  They could be in the middle of a crime scene or the middle of nowhere; it could be ninety-eight degrees outside or raining so hard you can't see the road; his partner may have been awake on the job for seventy-two hours or pulled over to doze on the side of the road five minutes ago.  But every day at 2 p.m., come hell or high water (and the state boasts plenty of both), Marty turns the car toward the nearest tumbledown gas station in search of a pot of sad brown sludge sitting on an old corroded burner like an ancient sacrifice.  

“Could use some coffee,” Marty says, the words already familiar as the squeak in the car door.  “You want anything?”

Marty always wants something: a sandwich, a different radio station, a more comfortable pair of shoes.  You deny him anything and he acts like he’ll never have it again.  He’s ruddy-cheeked and his hands, when he passes Rust a cup or a folder or a pen, always feel hot.   He chokes out all the space in the car, pauses too long between words when he’s thinking, fidgets with those stupid sunglasses.  At lunch he has two or three beers and his gestures grow more expansive; he drinks to make himself bigger than he is, fuel for the Molotov cocktail he wishes he were.  It annoys Rust, who drinks to make himself less, to water himself down to the merest shimmer of moisture in the bottom of a glass.  Rust does not want anything from the gas station.  Rust never wants anything.  He finds desire exhausting and useless.

He’s having a hard time dealing with Marty today.  Most days he can grit his teeth and remind himself it could be a lot worse; his new partner is a pretty good detective, a good deal smarter than the act he puts on for the locals.  He's never intentionally racist and his sexism is only occasionally crude.  But he’s just so _much_ , and Rust hasn’t slept in . . . well, a while now.  “We don’t have time for you to spend half an hour contemplating which candy bar you want,” he says, out of nothing more than a perverse desire to piss Marty off.  “We told Quesada we’d be back by five.”

“You should get more sleep,” Marty says, loosening his tie and getting out of the car.  “You’re not your usual charming self today.  And you look like a fucking zombie.”  

The simile is apt; sometimes he thinks he’s occupying a body that died some time back and his brain just hasn’t caught on yet.  Perhaps he is a vampire leaching life from his partner, or maybe it’s the other way around; certainly feels like it right now.  Maybe it's symbiosis--maybe they're mutually parasitic.  Maybe Marty’s right and he should try to get some sleep, only fuck Marty, he doesn’t need to be told when to sleep like he’s a fucking child.

“I meant what I said,” Marty says when he returns only seven minutes later.  “You look ragged as hell and Quesada will be down your throat if you show up to the debriefing like that.  Says it’s not good for the unit.”

“I’m not part of a unit.” ( _Our bosses don't want you at all, you understand? I don't want you_.)

“I thought individual consciousness was an illusion,” Marty retorts, opening a package of peanut-butter cups.

“So is societal concern.  You think I’m a detriment to this investigation, fucking say so.  Otherwise don’t condescend to me by acting like you give a fuck.”  He hears his voice tremble slightly, as if he’s angry.  That’s new.  ( _I ain’t bothered by it, brother.  No reason for you to be_.)

“Whatever, prick.”  Marty tosses a package of caffeine pills in his lap.  “Got you these.”

Rust swallows three without water and doesn’t say _thank you_ , because there’s no point.  There’s an expiration date on his time with Louisiana State PD, just like there is on everything else; it’s just a question of whether Marty or Quesada will be the first to get fed up with him, if he doesn't crash his truck from sleep deprivation before they have a chance.  He’s a pile of marbles rolling around and each morning he has to try to gather himself back up into a pile before bits of him try to scatter every which way; his partner is a runaway car with a driver who won’t apply the brakes because the inevitability of crash is preferable to keeping still.  For now they’re careening in the same direction, but it will end messy.

\---

_She was floating away from the rocky hill and down until she lay upon a grassy meadow soft as a bed of flowers. She woke beside a bright river; and on its band was a mansion stately and beautiful as though built for a god, with pillars of gold and walls of silver and floors inlaid with precious stones. No sound was to be heard; the place seemed deserted and Psyche drew near, awestruck at the sight of such splendor._

\---

He tries to retreat, burrowing into the silent bare whiteness of his apartment, everything stripped from his vision, no colors or shapes to shift and twist into flashing lights, gaping shadows, delicate wisps of smoke.  He dresses in muddy greys and dusty browns, hoods his eyes.  But then here comes Marty, dragging the world behind him like a comet’s tail: bright silver constellations of gum wrappers in the cup holder and Skynyrd always barely audible on the radio, a constant undercurrent of swamp moans and saccharine guitars.  Marty using too many napkins, crumbs and sugar granules a complex cartography on the landscape of the table.  Marty with his jazz-trumpet voice, bleeding blue and green into everything like northern lights, pulling Rust kicking and screaming back into the world.

“Where you wanna have lunch?” Marty asks, three weeks into the Lange case.

“Don’t care.”

Marty pulls the car over abruptly and glares at his partner.  “I’m sick of decidin’ every time, especially when you just pick at your food often as not.  Maggie got onto me for not making sure you eat enough, and Macie says you look like the scarecrow from  _The Wizard of O_ z.”

“Don’t think I’m the one here missin’ a brain,” he mutters passive-aggressively at the window.

“Shut the fuck up.  We ain’t movin’ ‘til you pick somewhere to eat.”

Rust sits and waits, because he knows Marty isn’t patient enough to follow through on his threat.  There’s a Burger King two streets over, and he considers that briefly.  Ginger was always dragging him to the fucking Burger King. Crash liked it okay; Crash liked overdone burgers and Molly Hatchet and muscle cars and Schlitz, because he had to, because those were the delicate strands of the web he was trapped in.  But Crash is gone now, and Rust has a hard time remembering his favorite food, his favorite color, his favorite song.  Every time he tries, he ends up stuck in a process of negation, defining himself against his partner: _I do not like artificial sweetener.  I do not like paisley.  I do not fucking like Skynyrd._

It takes Marty two and a half minutes to break.  “There’s that new pizza place a couple exits down.  You want pizza?” And before Rust can respond, he snaps, “--and if you say you don’t care, I will shoot you.  I’ll shoot you in the goddamn face.”  The threat's so preposterous Rust almost feels himself smile.

He’s pretty sure that he doesn’t want pizza, although he’s not sure why.  Maybe it’s the soggy cardboard-crust squares he remembers from elementary school, or the boxes of cheap frozen crap that Claire always filled the freezer with and the sauce-stain that ruined Sophia’s little yellow dress, the one with the bumblebees he’d bought special for her second birthday; or maybe it’s the way the stringiness of mozzarella always seems to put a high-pitched noise in the back of his head like untuned violins.  Hell, maybe he just doesn’t want it because Marty does.  

“I don’t like pizza,” he finally answers, a bit uncertainly.

“Well, what do you like?” Marty says, impatient but with real curiosity, like he’s Gepetto trying to build a human boy and Rust is not giving him a whole hell of a lot to work with.

There’s another long pause, and then a memory comes to him--a hole-in-the-wall joint in Houston when he first moved there.  He was giddy about having enough money in his pocket to eat at a restaurant and felt a little improvident for doing so.  Restaurants were for people who couldn't feed themselves, his pop always said, and who therefore had failed to pass the most basic test of self-sufficience.  It was May and humid and the ceiling fans barely stirred the air and did nothing to disturb the flies.  He ordered a plate of Carolina-style barbeque and asked for their hottest sauce and then grabbed the bottle of Texas Pete off the table and added that too, and it felt like flames tracing a path down his throat and setting coals in his stomach, and soon he was watery-eyed, pouring sweat and he thought _fuck Alaska_ and ordered a second plate.

“Hot sauce,” he says, and Marty rolls his eyes (“well you can’t just fucking eat hot sauce for lunch, dipshit”) and starts the car, pointing it in the direction of his favorite soul food place for sweet cornbread and fried green tomatoes and chicken so tender it shreds beneath your plastic fork.  He shakes the small glass bottle over his plate and red dots of pepper sauce flare up like sunbursts.  He eats every bite.

\----

On the longest car rides stories somehow tumble out of him like old stones being pulled from his throat on a wire; they lie in Marty’s hands, staining them with mud.  He never tells Rust to shut the fuck up, though, and usually he has no compunction about that sort of thing.  Once, when they find a body that the gators have been at, Rust finds himself reminiscing about the remains of a hiker he found in the woods once--some kid who didn’t know his ass from his elbow and went out into the bush trying to find himself, wound up finding teeth and claws instead.  Bears, as a rule, don’t fuck with you unless they’ve been fucked with, so Rust didn’t feel bad for the kid then and doesn’t now.  There’s some interesting comparisons and contrasts to be made between the two attacks, and he starts to get kind of carried away, until he notices that Marty’s looking a little green around the gills.

“...sorry,” he trails off awkwardly.  At North Shore they told him he needed to be more receptive to other people’s perspectives.  He figures he needs to start practicing lest he accidentally let loose with a story like that around Maggie and the girls.  

“Ask you somethin’?” Marty says, already wearing that characteristic trying-to-eat-the-side-of-his-own-face look.  “How old was you, when you seen that?”

“Seven or eight, I guess.”

“Jesus.  You know what I was doin’ at that age?”  He doesn’t, and he affixes Marty with a look that strives desperately to communicate how little he cares to hear it.  “Ain’t you got any _good_ memories?”

He considers this.  “We set a grenade off in the backyard once.  That was fun.”

Marty grunts disapprovingly under his breath before segwaying into an explosion story of his own, something about a large pan of strawberry Jello stolen from the school cafeteria, a rotted-out tree trunk in an abandoned lot on the far end of the street, and handful of fireworks left over from the fourth of July.  “My dad beat my ass over that one,”  Marty says with a chuckle.

“Don’t see what the big deal was,” Rust replies, flipping through his ledger.  Marty’s childhood memories are always intensely boring.  “Nobody hurt by it, unless you think the chipmunks and moles in that particular neighborhood weren’t crazy about strawberry.”

“You know how it is.  Didn’t want me fuckin’ around.  Your dad probably roughed you up plenty too, I reckon.”  He looks over at Rust searchingly, as if hoping to wipe out a nagging suspicion that there was something dark and sinister about his old man’s particular brand of discipline.  Suddenly the bundle of annoying-ass contradictions that is Marty Hart makes a little more sense.

Travis could be a real sonofabitch and Christ knows his own particular choice of lifestyle wasn’t the most appropriate to bring a kid up in, and Rust was plenty scared growing up out in the bush--scared of his pop sometimes, too, when he was high on shine or shrooms and got talking crazy.  But he never raised a hand against his son, and Rust doesn’t recall ever fearing he might hurt him, not on purpose.

“I never hit my girls,” Marty says, a little abruptly, and usually this is where Rust would tell him he doesn’t deserve a medal for not being an asshole--but there’s a rabbit-scared look in Marty’s eyes and he thinks better of it.

\---

He finds comfort in the steadiness of his new life: the 2 p.m. coffee, the soft graygreen blur of the countryside whirring past the car window, the way a new pen glides over paper.  In being able to concentrate long enough to read; in long walks with no destination, stars on a clear night. He clears the grit away and tries to unearth some small pearl of self, learning that he sleeps easier when it’s raining, that restaurants are nice but grocery stores make him nervous, that he looks good in blue and likes his tea unsweet.  He thinks maybe he knew some of this before, but he’d forgotten.


	9. prytaneum

_prytaneum_.  in ancient Greece, the building that housed the central hearth; a symbol of community.

\---

And one, if she would rest, would show her bed,  
Pillow'd for sleep, with fragrant linen fine;  
One, were she hungry, had a table spread  
Like as the high gods have it when they dine:  
Or, would she bathe, were those would heat the bath;  
The joyous cries contending in her path,  
Psyche, they said, What wilt thou? all is thine.

Then Psyche would have thank'd their service true,  
But that she fear'd her echoing words might scare  
Those sightless tongues . . . .  
\--Robert Bridges, “Eros and Psyche”

Summer after summer has ended,  
balm after violence:  
it does me no good  
to be good to me now;  
violence has changed me . . . .

My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;  
now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,  
with the sense it is being tested . . . .

Above the fields,  
above the roofs of the village houses,  
the brilliance that made all life possible  
becomes the cold stars.

Lie still and watch:  
they give nothing but ask nothing.

\--Louise Glück, “October”

\---

“You’re not very good at this, Mr. Cohle,” Macie says with the weighty concern of a seven-year-old.  He wonders, not for the first time or the last, what would have become of another little girl if she’d reached the age when children start to move beyond the safe golden circle of the immediate family; whether she would have grasped at the world with Claire’s sharp hunger or eyed it cautiously from a distance.  He can’t imagine she would have been much like Macie, who has inherited both her father’s belief in an orderly universe and her mother’s tight-jawed determination to bend that universe to her will.  Her worldview will not allow for a grownup--a _policeman_ , no less--failing so spectacularly at a game of Memory.

“No,” he says, staring with barely disguised hatred at the oft-handled pieces of flimsy cardboard littering the Harts’ living-room carpet, “I reckon I’m not.”  His fourth non-matching pair in as many turns glares up at him judgmentally.

There are different version of the game, he’s been informed.  Some with flowers, or fruit, or animals: you match lambs to sheep, kittens to cats.  Macie has the version with faces, which she requested specially for her birthday.  He’s not surprised at her preference.  She seems to be attuned to other people’s moods in a way that no one else in her family is, and studies expressions like books.

(“I think my Daddy has a girlfriend,” she said once, quite casually and apropos of nothing, while handing Rust a Sprite cold from the fridge.  He blinked once and didn’t reply.  She peered into his face for a moment, then skipped away, humming “Hakuna Matata.”)

“Daddy’s very good,” she continues.  “He almost always wins.”

Marty, settled in his recliner, gives a sidelong grin from behind his beer.  Rust glares in response and bites back an uncharitable retort about what kind of man doesn’t let his seven-year-old beat him in a card game.  “Your dad’s more of a people person, I guess.”

“Don’t see how you can detect stuff if you can’t remember what folks look like,” she says, shuffling the cards back into a neat pile with an air of resignation, as if she’s decided there’s no point trying to compete against someone as incompetent as Rust.

“Well, there’s other stuff to it.”  He glances up at the clock.  In seven minutes he will have been here for exactly two hours, which he estimates is a long enough visit that he can leave without seeming rude.

“Like what?”

He thinks of running delicate metal instruments under fingernails to check for flecks of blood and skin, assessing lividity, timing death by the presence of beetles.  Marty gives Rust a warning look, like he thinks he’s stupid enough to say any of that out loud.  “Paperwork,” he finishes lamely.

\----

The aroma hits him as soon as he steps into his apartment.  Tomato sauce and ground beef, a round, full scent, with bright sunny notes of oregano.  He steps into the kitchen, trying to ignore the packed suitcases by the door.  The Harts reconciled last night at a Baton Rouge Olive Garden and then, to hear Marty tell it, reconciled again in the backseat of the Pontiac out in the parking lot.  Rust lingered late at work today, hoping he’d be gone by now.  Having Marty around has been a pain in the ass, but he’d made the place feel different somehow, pale-gold and soft like dandelion florets, and Rust had slept better with him upstairs.  Tomorrow the air between these walls will be sharp and blue and empty again.  The thought makes him feel weary.  

 _People can survive on a lot less than you’d think_ , his pop used to say.   _Don’t get accustomed to what you don’t need_.

The smell is spaghetti, the only thing Marty knows how to make.   “Figured I owe you one,” he says, ladling it out onto two of Rust’s three plates, “you putting me up like this.”  Rust just shrugs and reaches for the bottle next to the stove.  “Hold up,” Marty says.  “You can’t put hot sauce on spaghetti.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“Fine.  Fine.  What _ever_ , as Audrey says,” Marty retorts.  “At least you’re eating.”

\----

Marty’s seen this before, that look Rust gets, like his head is held onto his skinny neck with fraying wire.  The ever-present ballpoint’s gone limp in his hand, trailing in nonsense lines across the page of his ledger, and every time the road goes even he starts to tilt to one side, only to jerk and upright himself when they hit a pothole or curve.

“When’s the last time you slept?”

He gets a vague grunt in response.  Marty’d hoped all this might end with the Ledoux case, but he thinks maybe stepping back into Crash’s skin rattled Rust more than he’d like to admit.  He reckons it’s been three days since he had any real sleep, maybe more--after a year together he can read the bags under Rust's eyes like tea leaves.

Marty pulls the car over, cuts the engine, and fishes the files for the Peterson double homicide out of the backseat.  Rust is awake now, edgy, with a look that says he’s not annoyed yet but he’s fully prepared to be.  “The fuck you doin’, Marty.”

“Paperwork.”

“Yeah.  Why you doin’ it on the side of the goddamn road and not back at the station?”

“‘Cause you can’t take a nap back at the station.”  Rust just stares blankly.  “No point arguin’ with me.”

“Since when do you tell me what to do?”

“I’m practicin’ for when I get that promotion.  Quesada says I have leadership qualities.”

“You’re not a good leader,” Rust grumbles, his eyelids drooping.  “You’re just a really shitty follower.”

“Just close your eyes for fifteen fucking minutes.”

“That work on the girls?”

“Just on Audrey,” he replies, opening the file and clicking the pen open. “Macie’s a bit more high-strung.”

Rust tilts his head back against the seat.  “She doesn’t sleep because she doesn’t want to miss anything,” he murmurs.  Already he sounds drowsy.

It’s stuffy without the engine running the air; Marty rolls down the window and a cool breeze lifts tendrils off Rust’s forehead.  He rakes the curls back with one hand and mutters something semi-intelligible about “cut this shit off one of these days” before nodding off.  He sleeps for forty-five minutes, which doesn’t seem to Marty to be long enough to do any fucking good but his eyes are brighter when he wakes, his hands surer.  He even steals one of Marty’s Reese’s cups from the package when they stop at a gas station on the way back, licking grains of peanut butter off his fingertips with a comically innocent expression.

“Where the fuck you two been,” Quesada asks when they pull in at a quarter to six.  

“Flat tire,” Marty answers, and Rust gives him the tiniest, most conspiratorial smile.


	10. acesodyne

_acesodyne_. mitigating or relieving pain.

\---

What's your life been like? Any real blood, any prison? Four times? Don't go, don't go . . . . I know I'm not human. My father died before I was born. That desperate to avoid me . . . . Why don't you get up? Walk out? Why are you listening to my hysterical crap? Don't worry about me. I'll survive. I've lived through two religious conversions. I thrive on tearing myself to bits. I even bought poison. Once. In a moment of strength. I was too weak to take it. Hung the cross there in my Catholic period. Look: coated in sugar. Like to lick my poison? I licked one once to try. Well, it's not the best. All I could afford. Little corner shop in London . . . . When I went sightseeing in the madhouse there was a young man who spent all his time stamping on his shadow. Punched it. Went for it with a knife. Tried to cut the head off. Anything to be free.  
\--Edward Bond, _Bingo_

A soft light rising above the level meadow,  
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.  
He wants to say _I love you, nothing can hurt you_  
but he thinks  
that is a lie, so he says in the end  
_you’re dead, nothing can hurt you_  
which seems to him  
a more promising beginning, more true.  
\--Louise Glück, “A Myth of Devotion”

\---

The suspect’s accomplice claims the bodies are in pieces somewhere in the bayou.  Rust is pretty sure it’s bullshit, and officially goes on the record saying so, but they’re not listening to him.  No one’s quite sure whose jurisdiction it is and nobody actually wants the case, which involves tromping three hours deep into the mosquito-infested swamp in 98-degree weather wearing hip waders over their suits, but Marty and the local sheriff have been comparing dick sizes all morning and no one will give ground.  Rust isn’t sure which one of them he’s more inclined to strangle, but if there aren’t two bodies already in this swamp, there will be before sundown.

Then the sheriff accidentally drops their only compass into the mud (Rust could tell them which direction’s southeast without it, but he’s feeling ornery and Marty’s too proud to ask him at this point) and Marty loses his shit entirely.  Reminds Rust a little of that movie Marty’d made him watch the previous Halloween, the one about the stupid kids who got lost in the woods.  The girl had freaked out like that when their map went missing.  

Before Rust can stop them, Marty and the sheriff get into a shoving match that leaves both of them covered in mud from head to foot.  And Rust doesn’t know if it’s the heat or the general absurdity of the situation or the tiny toad now perched on Marty’s slime-encrusted right shoulder, but for the first time in he doesn't know how long, he feels laughter bubbling up inside him and spilling over.  He doubles over, giggling helplessly, struggling to catch his breath.

Marty looks pissed for about half a second, and then breaks out into a smile.  “Holy fuck,” he says.  “Five years on the job with this sonofabitch and I ain’t never heard that sound come out of him before.”

\---

Marty will be the first to admit that he can get carried away at times, but come on, it’s his first high-speed chase.  He grins like a maniac as he navigates the curves of backwoods roads, ignoring the fact that Rust’s got one hand wrapped tight around the oh-shit bar and is looking as close to alarmed as he’s ever seen him.  His adrenaline’s running so high that he doesn’t even mind when he sends the Pontiac spinning into the side of a local cruiser.  He lets out a thrilled caw of laughter and looks over at his partner.  “Did you see that sh--”

He breaks off abruptly when he sees Rust’s face, white and strained, lower lip pressed between his teeth.  He’s holding his right arm in his left, clasped tight up against his chest. 

“What is it?”

“I think it’s broken,” Rust says.  There’s no discernible trace of emotion in his voice, but his jaw is clenched so tight you can barely make out the words.  “Call it in, please.”

“What the fuck--”

“Wrist hit the door handle.”  Marty can see beads of sweat starting to stand out on Rust’s brow.  He peers at the offending hand and notes, with a touch of nausea, that it does seem to be hanging at a funny angle.

“Marty,” Rust snaps. “Quit gawkin’ and call it in.”

“Shit.   Yeah.”  He picks up the radio.  “I-23 to dispatch.”

“Go ahead, I-23.”

“Here on the scene in Bienville, gonna need an ambulance for Detective Cohle.”

An uncharacteristic pause.  “He all right?”

Peggy is twenty-four, with a bouncy blonde ponytail and a perennial mouthful of strawberry bubblegum that you can always hear pop and crack over the wire.  She’s been working dispatch about eight months now, transferred from up in Shreveport.  Marty likes her; she’s organized and efficient, quick to respond, so steady you could set a watch by her.  He’s never heard her break protocol like that before, but he knows she’s got a soft spot for Rust--hell, probably everyone at the station knows it, except for Rust himself.  He wonders if she’d feel that way if she talked to him anywhere but on the radio, which is just about the only time Rust acts like he has any goddamn sense.

“Broken wrist, looks like.”

“Bless his heart.  Copy that. Over and out.”

Marty replaces the radio, looks over at his partner, and grins.  

“Don’t.”

“ _Bless your heart_.”  

“I said stop it.”

“You ever gonna ask her out?”

“She’s a _child_.  I know you have a yen for barely-pubescent cheerleader fantasies, but please don’t invite me to participate.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

The radio announces itself with a staticky hum.  “Dispatch to I-23.”

“I-23, go.”

“Forty minutes.  Sorry, y’all.  Looks like you’re about fifty miles away from everywhere right now.  You hang in there, honey,” she adds cheerfully, and Rust rolls his eyes.

“Copy,” Marty replies.  “I-23 over and out.”  He clicks the radio off.  “This the first time you ever broke a bone?”

Rust breathes slowly for a minute, in through his nose and out through his mouth, before answering.  “What do you think?”

Marty thinks about those four years UC and the holes in Rust’s side, starts to contemplate all the crazy shit that’s probably smashed him up by this point and starts to feel dizzy.  “Yeah, me too, coupla times.  First was playin’ baseball in some kid’s backyard when I was eight.  Went for the catch, came up against this rock, busted my arm.”  He’s not sure why he’s telling him all this--Rust has made it infinitely clear that he doesn’t want to hear about “the Rockwellian fever dream of your uncannily middle-class upbringing,” as he calls it--it’s better than listening to him breathing all weird like that.  “You play baseball when you were a kid?”

“Never did.”

“What, y’all don’t have baseball in Alaska?  What y’all play, ice hockey? Lacrosse?”  Marty is only vaguely aware of what lacrosse is, but it sounds weird enough for Rust to have played it.  

“Kids play baseball in Alaska.”  There’s a silence that follows that Marty can read clear as any speech; you can’t play baseball by yourself, and he can’t imagine Rust being any more popular as a kid than he is now.

“Broke my finger once, too, back in college,” Marty says.  He holds it up, slightly crooked and scarred along the edge, and waggles it in the periphery of Rust’s vision until he finally turns and looks.  “Mardi Gras.  Fell off a balcony.”

“Surprised you didn’t break more’n a finger.”

“Yeah, well, God looks out for drunks and small children.”  The cliche is out of his mouth before he can think about it and he feels the blood drain from his face.  “Shit, man, I’m sorry. _Shit_.  I didn’t--”

“Marty.”  Rust closes his eyes, leans his head back. “Cut it out.”

“The pain bad?”

“Ain’t good.”

“Don’t you have nothin’ with you?  Whatever that shit is that you take when you all wound up.”  Rust’s eyes blink open in surprise.  “What are they, anyway, them pills?”

“Different things,” he answers vaguely, looking away.  “I’ve mostly stopped.”

“Mostly, huh?”

“Oh, give it a rest, Marty.  You’re hardly Carrie fucking Nation yourself.”

There’s a long, resentful pause, before Marty growls “I ain’t asking you who that is.”

“She was a Temperance--”

“I said I don’t fuckin’ care.”  He’s not an idiot, for fuck’s sake.  He’s senior detective.  He had a B+ average at USL.  He watches _Jeopardy_.  He shouldn’t need a graduate degree in obscure-ass references to talk to his partner.  He’s just about to say so when Rust, in the process of trying to dig a cigarette out of the pocket of his sportcoat with his good hand like the goddamn fool he is, jostles his wrist and inhales sharply through clenched teeth.

“Jesus Christ.”  He snatches cigarettes and lighter from his hands, lights the cigarette himself, and shoves it between Rust’s lips.  Rust grunts something that’s probably supposed to be gratitude.  

Marty flips the radio on.  “The Beast walks among--” _Click_.  “Revelation teaches--” _Click_. “--living in the end times--” _Click_.  Fucking Sunday mornings.  What kind of music does Rust like?  Does he even listen to music? Marty hasn’t let him touch the radio since he badmouthed Skynyrd back in February ‘95. “So what'd you break before?”

Rust speaks around the cigarette clenched in his teeth.  “Marty,” he says, “don’t think I don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do.”

“You ain’t never appreciated shit,” he mutters under his breath.

“But you don't need to distract me.  I'm not a child.”

“You rather sit there and think about how bad it hurts?  We’re out in the middle of damn nowhere with another twenty minutes at least til the ambulance gets here.  So either tell me some crazy stories about growing up in Siberia--”

“Alaska.”

“--or I’m gonna start singing songs from _Tarzan_ , which Macie has already watched three times this week.”

Rust says nothing for several minutes; his cigarette burns down to the filter and Marty snatches it from his lips and grinds it out in the ashtray.  He does not actually know any of the songs from _Tarzan_ , and he resents the fact that Rust has called his bluff.

Finally he speaks.  “Broke my arm once.  Fell out of a tree.  I was ten.”

Every time he tries to envision Rust as a child he just pictures a slightly shorter adult, with the same deadpan expression, ledger clasped in his small hands, candy cigarette dangling from his lip.  “How long you have the cast on?”  Silence.  “Oh, come on.  Your crazy-ass dad _did_ go have a cast put on it, right?”

“Eventually.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Nothin’ he couldn’t splint himself.”

“No wonder you’re so fucked up.”

“You say that a lot,” Rust says.  “I feel like you’re compiling a dossier.”

“Greatest mystery I’ll ever solve.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.”  Rust leans his head back against the seat, breathing easier now.  “Broke my nose when I was fifteen.”.

“Who were you fighting?” Marty asked, because he doesn’t have to ask how it happened.  He imagines that pissing people off was probably fifteen-year-old Rust’s default state.  

“Just a couple of pricks in my class.  And then my ribs were busted, when I got shot.”

“You just can’t stay out of trouble, can you?”

“Seems like.”

A few quiet minutes pass before the ambulance pulls up behind them.  Marty goes around and opens the passenger door, but Rust shakes off his hand when he tries to help him out of the car.  “Want me to ride with you?” he asks as the ambulance doors swing open, and Rust just gives him a _look_ ; but he hears a muttered "thanks, man" before they close again.


	11. cherophobia

_cherophobia_.  a fear of happiness, stemming from the belief that something terrible will happen as a result.

\---

Love is a bird in a fist:  
To hold it hides it, to look at it lets it go.  
It will twist loose if you lift so much as a finger.  
It will stay if you cover it--stay but unknown and invisible.  
Either you keep it forever with fist closed  
Or let it fling  
Singing in fervor of sun and in song vanish.  
There is no answer other to this mystery.  
\--Archibald MacLeish, “Psyche with the Candle”

Ours is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame,  
Manifold motions making little speed,  
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.  
\--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Psyche”

Persephone is having sex in hell.  
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know  
what winter is, only that  
she is what causes it.  
\--Louise Glück, “Persephone the Wanderer”

\---

When he casts his mind back over the years like a line from one of Marty’s fishing poles, those seven years jump out the clearest, bright, colorful fish swimming in the murk.  Maybe it’s just because it’s the only sober stretch in his whole sordid history, or maybe it’s the thousand invisible threads attaching him to things: Maggie and the girls, Quesada and Salter, the blind dates, the three or four dozen resentful local cops who gripped just a bit too hard when they shook his hand after he got their confessions for them, the guy he bought cigarettes from at the store down the road every morning at 7:15 a.m. sharp.  And Marty, always Marty, steady and maddening like a pulse.

It’s been a good winter for stargazing.  The view from his place isn’t great--the sky’s a smoky burnt caramel, too close to the city lights--but from Marty’s backyard late at night, when the suburbs are shuttered and asleep, you can pluck stars from the sky like rhinestones from velvet.  

He tries to explain to Marty once, on a mild November night, what his pop told him about the stars.  He can’t quite get the words right--he lacks that sonorous mad-prophet cadence that made Travis’s crazy shit sound like truth--but he tries to explain it all the same.  That they’re the only things that stay put, more or less: you can know them, and the knowledge gives the universe structure and shape when all other meaning blows apart.  That nothing is up there looking out for you, but you can read the patterns in the sky to look out for yourself, plan for winter, find your way home.  “That sounds kinda nice,” Marty says.  “Hard to imagine your old man sayin’ anything like that.  I always picture him like somethin’ out of _Apocalypse Now_.”  He grins and claps Rust on the back, then heads back inside.

The warmth that suffuses through him them makes him feel weak, unsteady.   _Don’t get accustomed to what you don’t need_ , Travis mutters at the back of his brain.

\---

_They had learned, they said, and knew for a fact, that her husband was not a man, but the fearful serpent Apollo's oracle had declared he would be. He was kind now, no doubt, but he would certainly turn upon her some night and devour her. Psyche felt terror flooding her heart instead of love._

\---

“You queer or something?” Marty finally asks, after a half-decade of disastrous blind dates.

“Or something,” Rust says, because it’s easier.  He thinks of Claire’s fingernails, painted redblack like a scab and filed to a sharp point; they left scratches on his thighs like a kitten’s claws.  He thinks of nights he can’t remember when he was someone he doesn’t quite know, waking up in motel rooms, the stench of cheap beer and pot smoke and the fingertip-sized bruises in the hollows of his hips the only sign that Ginger had been there.  The thinks of how he was marked and how he marked others in return and how every touch, given or taken, has felt like a negotiation or a compromise.  He’s never been sure if he even likes sex.  He liked that feeling he got sometimes, for a moment--just a moment--like a golden thread stitching up tight, like being half of a whole.  But the feeling always passed.

“You just have to find the right person,” Maggie says, as if each of the individual women are the problem rather than Rust.  Maggie is a lot more honest than her husband, but that ain’t saying much, and her disingenuous politeness tastes like sour milk on the back of his tongue.  

 _Anything that cannot perform its assigned task must be melted down and reshaped into something else_ , his pop always said, but even Travis knew his philosophy was of limited use: sooner or later a blanket is too worn to mend, too ragged to block the snow blowing in through gaps between the boards, too mildewed and motheaten to insulate the canned vegetables they put up every summer.  He knew, too, when to junk an old truck engine, because corrupted metal is more dangerous than it is useful.  Rust is a gun that’s been thrown into a crucible and forged into a paper clip, a chain-link fence, a dinner fork, and sooner or later he’s going to break apart into ugly shards.  He stares at Marty and Maggie across the dinner table and wonders why they don’t see it.  

He meets Laurie, and she likes that he’s low-maintenance, that he’s simple and self-sufficient, that he lives without need.  He starts to buy his clothes new, cool grays and dull blues like an expensive knife. He cuts his hair short like a manicured lawn.  He starts whetting himself into a blade, and waits for something to press his edge against.

\---

Looking back, New Orleans was the beginning of the end.  Laurie had never been, even after three years in Louisiana--always too busy with work.  “I want to take a weekend.  The whole tourist nightmare,” she says over dinner.  “We can do it ironically, if you want.”  People always assume that Rust is doing things ironically, although that’s never the case.

It’s too fucking much.  Plastic glasses half-full of the sludge of hurricanes and daiquiris, cheap glittery beads hanging from dangerously rusted fire escapes, ersatz fetishes everywhere.  Corn-syrup mint juleps and brass bands a quarter-note off key.  He gets a little worked up, by his own admission--he never did know when to shut the hell up--and starts in about how the only thing New Orleans is selling is the experience of having something sold to you, and Laurie says “we’re supposed to be having _fun_ ,” and he’s so fucking tired of people telling him how he’s supposed to feel about things.  So the second day he refuses to go to the Garden District because why in God’s name does anyone consider looking at rich’s people’s houses a good time, and Laurie just purses her lips, says “a normal person would have faked a headache or something to get out of it,” and goes without him.  That’s when he realizes--five months before it actually ends--that he’s already worn her down so much that she’s too tired to fight back.

He thinks of Claire, and wonders if she never really loved him and it was just no longer worth it to keep up the pretense, or if she did love him and it just wasn’t enough to balance out the mountain of shit he piled up on her. He wishes it were the former, but he knows better.

\---

_In her first shame at her folly and lack of faith, Psyche fell on her knees and would have plunged the knife into her own breast if it had not fallen from her trembling hands. But those same unsteady hands that saved her betrayed her, too, for as she hung over him, ravished at the sight of him and unable to deny herself the bliss of filling her eyes with his beauty, some hot oil fell from the lamp upon his shoulder. He started awake: he saw the light and knew her faithlessness, and without a word he fled from her._

\---

Rust believes in good and evil, but only as abstract notions.  To believe in their concrete existence, he would have to believe in the ability of human beings to carry out either without fucking it up spectacularly.  He does not trust people, which is not exactly the same thing as mistrusting them; he merely accepts they are frail and will let him down sooner or later, on the off chance he doesn’t do it to them first.  ( _You never had any goddamn loyalty, kid._ )  He doesn’t want to hurt Laurie, but he’s going to, because that’s what he does: he’s shaved so many pieces of himself away over the years that he’s whittled down to nothing, a ragged, sharp thing that leaves splinters in everything he touches. 

“She says you’re pushing her away,” Maggie says, pouring him a cup of coffee he doesn’t want.  He’s sleeping almost all the way through the night now, a victory that’s too hard-won to sacrifice for the sake of an 8 p.m. suburban sacrament.  He never drinks the coffee, and Maggie never notices.

He’s already had this conversation with Laurie; he had it with Claire, and has even had variations with Marty two or three times over the years.  Every single time he feels like he’s the sea and the shore is nagging at him: _I’ve noticed that every time you get close, you pull back again, like clockwork.  Maybe you could try not doing that_.

“Not all relationships are designed to last,” he says pointedly.  

(Last week, when Maggie was working late and Marty was stuck at a deposition and Audrey had detention, Rust was enlisted to pick Macie up from cheerleading practice.  She offered him a stick of gum, said “I’m pretty sure my Dad’s screwing around again” and stuck a pair of headphones over her ears.)

Maggie narrows her eyes and he can see that it physically pains her not to rise to his bait.  “You know she’s going to leave you.”

“Yep,” he answers, as easily as if she’d said, _you know the sun’s going to come up tomorrow, right?_

\---

_but did you want me? ain’t relevant_

_we’re grateful for your service. but you need a rest_

_maybe it’s good she’s gone. I can get away from you now_

“It wasn’t you,” Maggie says.  “I’m sorry, but thank you.”

\---

He knows Marty’s schedule like it’s his own pulse, knows the sight of his car in its usual space as well as the arrangement of bulletholes along his ribs.  He knows Maggie will have kicked him out by now and that he won’t have anywhere else to go but work.  He knows he could come by for those files later, when the building is empty and dark, and knows he doesn’t really need those fucking files anyway.  He knows that Marty’s gun and tie and class ring are in his desk.  He knows how this story is gonna play out.

At North Shore they called it _repetition compulsion_ : the desire to throw himself into a ravine because at least he recognized the landscape.  They warned him that he would do this again, and again, and again if he wasn’t careful. “It’s like you’re always bracing for a fight,” Laurie said once, “and if it doesn’t happen, you create one.”  Sophia’s blood on the driveway, Marty’s blood in the parking lot, Psyche with her goddamn lamp, poking at a good thing until it’s scorched and screaming.  There’s only one story, the oldest: “You climb a tree too high for you,” his pop said, as he passed Rust a bottle of whiskey and began to splint his arm, “you best be prepared to fall and get hurt.”


	12. katabasis

_katabasis_. a descent into the underworld.

\---

This is the light of autumn, not the light that says  
_I am reborn._  
Not the spring dawn: _I strained, I suffered, I was delivered._  
This is the present, an allegory of waste.  
\--Louise Glück, “October”

All will come here in their own sweet season.  
Perhaps you thought  
No one would notice you among so many,  
But you are not the shadow of a doubt,  
You are the thing itself.  
\--A.E. Stallings, “Three Poems to Psyche (The Boatman to Psyche, on the River Styx)”

\---

North is where he first learned to go without, and he knows he can survive there, stripped down to nothing as he is.  And if part of him could wish for somewhere warm and soft to land, he tells himself that desire is old and buried.

“I thought you didn’t like the cold,” Marty will say ten years later, and Rust thinks _you still don’t get it, do you, you fucking prick_.

\---

_When she came into Aphrodite’s presence the goddess laughed aloud and asked her scornfully if she was seeking a husband since the one she had had would have nothing to do with her because he had almost died of the burning wound she had given him._

\---

He dreams badly for more than a year after.  He dreams that he opens his ledger and a photo of Audrey and Macie falls out, not Audrey and Macie now but as they were that day in their pink and white outfits with their milk and cookies; no matter which way he holds the photo their eyes follow him and when he tucks it back under the cover he can feel their gaze on him still.  He dreams of Marie Fontenot, silent and hollow-eyed in the aisle of the local supermarket, her mouth hidden behind a swirl of blue acrylic paint; an air-conditioned breeze trembles between her outstretched fingers as she gropes blindly through the produce section.  He dreams of Maggie, naked and long-limbed, under his fluorescent kitchen lights.  Her knees and knuckles are bloody and she still holds a bottle of wine clenched in one fist.  

He doesn’t dream of Marty, but every day at 2 p.m. Central Standard Time, whatever the time wherever he is, an old brown scent fills his head like a noxious cloud.   _Could use a coffee.  You want anything?_

"I don't want anything," he whispers into the still, chilly air.  He never wants anything.

Nothing gets rid of that smell, not even the insistent silver-green aroma of a frozen sea when it fills your throat and turns your lungs to stone.  The days are hard but simple; the nights are a sodden blur.  He feels himself wearing down to sticks and ash, reduced to survival.  He sifts through the rubble of his childhood knowledge, reading patterns to retrace his steps through forest, through ice.  When newer memories creep in, smelling of yellow sunlight and strangling green plants, he drinks until they fade into the background again.  He spends three days in the woods, out behind the collapsed pile of sticks that used to be his childhood home, searching fruitlessly for his father’s skeleton.  He lets his hair grow like brambles and forgets to eat.

 _Looks like you could survive damn near anything_ , the Port Houston doctor had said.  He knows now that it’s true, and that it’s a curse.

\---

The longest he goes without speaking to anyone is thirty-seven days.  It’s not spent alone out in the woods; he has steady work hauling nets along the coast all day and stocking shelves at a local grocery store all night, drinking steadily but not too much because with two jobs he’s not sleeping anyway so there’s no need to drown out any dreams.  He spends those thirty-seven days taking orders, collecting paychecks, buying beer and groceries, responding to questions with nods and grunts.  What starts as a simple desire for silence in the wake of a particularly nasty hangover the morning of January 4th 2010 stretches out into sort of a social experiment: he decides to see how long it will take for someone to notice his silence.  No one does.  He considers talking to himself to make sure he can still remember how, but the sound of his own voice alone in the cabin frightens him.  Travis had talked to himself a lot, in his later years.

Finally, in mid-February, he drops a case of canned chicken noodle soup on his foot and yells out “ _FUCK_ ,” startling three old ladies and the town preacher and getting him fired from his last job in Alaska.  He realizes there’s only one thread left, knotted and tangled and thick with dried blood, tying him to the world.  

He never makes any specific plans regarding his demise.  Once he realizes he needs to fix the Louisiana thing before he goes, he figures the end will just kind of take care of itself.  

\---

_"But really," [Aphrodite] said, "you are so plain and ill-favored a girl that you will never be able to get you a lover except by the most diligent and painful service. I will therefore show my good will to you by training you in such ways."_

\---

“You’re bothering me, Rusty.”

It’s the only thing he can remember her saying, though he doesn’t know whether she said it one time or a thousand.  She was washing dishes in the kitchen, cigarette burning in an ashtray on the counter.  He was tugging at her skirt.  “Leave me alone, baby, you’re bothering me.”

“I never called you.  I never bothered you,” he says to Marty, defensively and a little pathetically, like a begging dog, because it’s the only thing he’s proud of anymore.  That he needed Marty, and he did not go to him.

“Yeah, why would you?” Marty interrupts.  “Shit, man, what did you do? Alienate every other person in your life, and then finally you came back to me in the rotation?”

\---

_Obediently as always Psyche went forth to look for the road to Hades._

\---

Not counting the Polaroid, the Frida Kahlo biography was the first thing Claire ever left at his apartment in Houston, about a week after their second date.  He remembers rolling over on his mattress, his skull full to bursting of the heady scent of sandalwood and tea roses she’d left in the sheets.  The dog-eared, worn-covered book lay by his pillow, and he lay there naked in the heat of the Texas sun streaming through the windows, and he read the entire thing.  Her favorite passages were circled in heavy charcoal, lipstick, watercolor paint, and he traced his fingers from one line to the next, as if he could trace out a constellation that would tell him their future.  The book concludes with a line from Kahlo’s diary, written a few days before her death, and it trails behind him all the way back to Louisiana: “I hope the exit is joyful; and _I hope never to return_.”

 _Death is not the end_ , Miss Delores says, and those words rattle around in his ribcage like icy stones as he climbs down into Carcosa.


	13. dimetor

_dimetor_. “two-mothered,” as of Dionysus: torn apart and reborn.

\---

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.  
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end  
still believing in something.

It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world.  
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.  
\---Louise Glück, “October”

You do not have to be good.  
You do not have to walk on your knees  
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.  
\--Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

Burn all of your bridges  
just so that you can build them again  
with thicker ropes.

Hurt all the people you love  
and then commit every felony to win them back.

Drown yourself in bleach until not even Heaven’s light  
can compare to how bright you can burn.

Turn yourself inside out  
and paint your organs the color of what you see  
in your dreams.

This is the art of  
living with a ticking heart — a grenade you  
throw through windows to make a  
point that language  
has no room for.

This is how I destroyed you. And this, is how  
I kept you alive.

Dig yourself a ditch, six  
feet deep, and bury everything that you’ve ever  
said, everything that you’ve never  
meant, and everything that has  
burned you and left you with nothing  
but ash.  
\--Shinji Moon, “Advice from Dionysus”

\---

“I’ll figure something out,” he says, although he’s more worried than he’ll let on.  He doesn’t have much money left, and the hospital bills are sky-high. _You ain’t got the God-given sense it takes to stay alive_ , his old man chuckles in the back of his head.   _Yeah, pop, that was kind of the general idea_.

“It’s already been figured out,” Marty says, and Rust’s throat feels hot and raw because frankly the sound of going back to Marty’s place and sacking out on the couch for a few days doesn’t sound too fucking bad, maybe he can’t keep hovering six inches above the earth anymore and sooner or later it’s gotta stop, he’s gotta find a soft place to land and just fucking _rest_.  So he spills his guts out at Marty’s feet and it’s every bit as ugly and messy as when he bled out in his hands, and Marty just squeezes his shoulder with awkward gentleness and says _look up at the stars and make up stories_.

 _No one’s ever gonna carry you_ , Travis said, but when he reaches up to haul himself to his feet, Marty's arms are around him before he even has a chance to stumble.

\---

“Bed's back there.  I'll take the couch.”

“Hell you will,” Rust grunts, and collapses on the couch before Marty can stop him.

Marty goes to the kitchen to get Rust a glass of water because he’s not sure what else the hell to do, and when he comes back he finds him tugging at his hospital bracelet, going at plastic wristband with his teeth like a dog with an old shoe.

“Hey, easy.”

“I want this fucking thing off me,” Rust mutters.  

“Okay, hold on then--”

“Hate these fuckin’ things.  Always have.”

Marty fishes a pair of scissors out of the kitchen drawer, tries to maneuver the blades around the strip of plastic in spite of the fact that the wrist is attached to a hand that’s currently flicking open the Zippo, lighting his fifth cigarette since they left the hospital.  Marty can feel the beginning of a fever seeping off the surface of his skin.  “This would go a lot smoother if you’d put that goddamn thing out.”

“Ain’t happenin’, brother.”

The blades snap together and the bracelet falls to the floor.  Marty sees Rust relax noticeably, hears a quiet sigh of relief.  He remembers Rust kicking off his dirty boots back in ‘95, hurling that leather jacket into a corner before collapsing on the mattress in a sweaty, hungover pile.  His shoulders fell like that then, too.  

Marty fishes the plastic strip off the carpet, wishing he’d thought to vacuum last weekend.  “You want this as a souvenir or anything?”

“I hate souvenirs,” Rust mutters, leaning back against the couch and closing his eyes.  “Throw the fucker out.”

\---

Rust didn’t own a bed when they moved into the house on West Sparrow, just a sagging used mattress he’d traded for some work on a car, no place to sleep a pregnant woman.  Claire slept on a futon in a tiny apartment she shared with four college classmates.  So after the boxes were all moved inside, he went out and bought a bed from a salesman that he was pretty sure was drunk and wrote the address down wrong, and then they waited for it to be delivered.  When it didn’t arrive by nightfall, Claire took the couch and Rust lay on the floor beside her in a heap of blankets, one hand stretched up to tuck his fingers under the swell of her belly.

The pain in his gut wakes him shortly before dawn and he drags his eyes open to find Marty next to the couch on the living-room carpet, snoring softly on a makeshift island of chair cushions, flannel throws, and what looks like a towel.  “Marty.”

“Hmph.”

“The fuck you doin’ down there.”

“Sleepin’,” he mutters, face smushed against the carpet. “Shutthefuckup.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Why ain’t you doin’ it in your own goddamn bed.”

Marty blinks slowly, rubs a palm across his eyes.  “Well, you looked kinda funny.”

“That so.”

“Yeah.  Like maybe you was gettin’ a fever or something.  And I thought you might pull your stitches, tossing and turning, like.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t want you bleedin’ on my couch,” Marty grunts, pulling himself upright.  “I mighta got it on sale but it’s still a nice couch.”  He stands and winces at the audible cracking in his knees.  “I’ll call the hospital about your meds.”

Rust stares at the window opposite and tries to ignore the feeling of frost spreading through his chest.  He thinks of his old man watching him pack: _You think this shit is real, none of it’s real_. He thinks of finding Sophia’s things in the dumpster, of Marty on the inflatable mattress upstairs and how cold and stale the air felt after he’d gone; he thinks about the inevitability of Marty getting tired of his bullshit yet again.  He realizes he doesn’t have the energy to get up off this couch and leave, and doesn’t have the energy to deal with what comes later if he doesn’t.

“They said to check your temperature,” Marty calls in from the kitchen.  He hears the beeping of the microwave.

“I’m fine.”  

Marty reappears and sets a bowl of soup on the coffee table. “We’ll let Mr. Thermometer here be the judge of that.”  He sticks the offending object between Rust’s lips, and the effort of trying to swat Marty away tires him out enough that he curls back up at the end of the couch in resignation.  “99.5.  She said to give you Tylenol.”

“I don’t need anything,” he says.  “Fuck off.”  Marty only gives a familiar grunt of annoyance as he shakes the caplets out into his hand.

“Here--”

“I said I don’t. I don’t. I don’t need anything.”  He can’t stop saying it, like a mantra or a verbal tic; he’s dizzy and it anchors him, somehow.  

“Yeah, yeah, I know.  You ain’t never needed nothin.’ You grew up in a tree in the Yukon, where you killed caribou with your bare hands and ate ‘em raw, and then used the bones to fight off bears.  I heard it all before.  You’re still gonna take this Tylenol and let me take your temperature again in an hour, and in the meantime, you’re gonna eat every last fuckin’ drop of this soup.”  He moves the bowl towards Rust’s face and Rust pushes back petulantly, splashing chicken broth on the upholstery.  

“Cut it out,” Marty says, impatiently but without any real anger.  “You’re pickin’ a fight with me.  You’re always pickin’ fights.  I didn’t ask you to high-tail it out of there against medical advice, so you can act like a goddamn grownup or I’m takin’ you back to the fuckin’ hospit-” he breaks off when he sees Rust tilt forward, thumbs pressed against his temples.  “You okay?”

“Fine. Head just hurts a little.”

“Well, of course it fuckin’ does.  Here, lay down.”  Marty hastily sets the bowl on the coffee table, sits beside Rust and pulls the pillow onto his lap.  The gesture reminds Rust of the time he came over and Audrey had the flu, curled up on the couch with her head in her father’s lap while he watched the basketball game.  “Just put your fuckin’ head down, man. It’s okay.”

He’s pretty sure he’s fallen asleep on Marty like this once before, on his mattress, after Ledoux.  They were drunk and exhausted and Marty’s stomach was hard with muscle then. _Soft beds make for soft men_ , a voice whispers in the back of his head.   _Shut the fuck up, pop_ , he replies.

\---

_Proserpine was willing to do Venus a service, and Psyche, greatly encouraged, bore back the box, returning far more quickly than she had gone down._

\---

It’s two weeks before Rust can walk more than a couple steps on his own.  It's humiliating to have to ask for Marty's arm every time he needs to piss, and awkward, too, this closeness, after ten years of resentful distance and a few months of uneasy truce.  Yet within a few days they’ve fallen into a graceless kind of dance.  Like any dance, it starts with sound: the creak of couch cushions, a guttural moan, a muffled curse as Rust tries to propel himself across the living room in spite of the feral sideways grin splitting his abdomen open.  Marty responds with an aggrieved sigh or a “goddamnit, Rust” and, without even thinking of it now, loops an arm around his waist, fingertips scrabbling for purchase against a too-sharp hipbone.  “I can walk across the fucking room on my own,” Rust always says, even though he can’t; or “I ain’t made of glass,” though he’s so pale and washed out you can damn near see right through him, or “I'm not dead yet, motherfucker,” though he half looks like that, too.  No matter; he’s always already throwing one arm around Marty’s neck even as he protests, hand curled in a half-fist in the hollow of Marty’s jaw.  The movement has become second nature in a way that reminds him, strangely, of tying the girls’ shoes in the morning, one loop and then the other on four small feet that wouldn’t stop kicking long enough for him to get the loops even, twisting those small white bows like an automaton, one half his brain focused on breakfasts and schoolbuses, the other half already at work, dragging a corpse out of the bayou.  It feels like sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of the carport while his father fixed the car, one small hand poised over the toolbox, waiting for the request for this wrench or that one, the way his dad’s hand would reach out from under the car without seeing, confident that Marty would put the correct item within his grasp; it feels like gathering Maggie’s hair up in one hand to twist it off the back of her neck and place his lips along the knob of bone at the top of her spine, anticipating the shiver that he knew would run along the surface of her skin like static.  It’s a weird thing to think of when you’re helping your best friend limp slowly to the john, but there it is.  

“Don’t need your help with this part,” Rust always snaps, and slams the bathroom door shut.

“I’ve literally had your guts in my hands,” Marty calls through the door.  “I can help you take a whiz, if I gotta.”

He hears a muffled retort from the other side: “Not _literally_ , asshole.”

\---

Now that he’s survived crucifixion, Rust finds himself wondering why Christ never wed.  Whether he simply wasn’t interested, because he had so much other shit to do, because when you’re living cheek to jowl with divinity itself orgasm seems like a petty sort of pleasure.  Or maybe he always knew he was doomed and didn’t want to pull anyone else down with him.  He wonders whether he steeled himself to walk through the world alone, twelve men orbiting him like planets, close but never touching.  

He thinks of this the first time Marty--as easily and unconsciously as he might have done ten years before, sitting by his wife--stretches his arm across the back of the couch and his hand brushes lightly across the back of Rust’s head, his fingers coming to rest somewhere near his shoulder.  He thinks of Christ alone in his tomb, of poison frogs that kill you when you touch them, of Psyche trying to get a closer look at Love and just hurting him and pissing him off in the process.  He thinks of these things and fights the urge to lean back into his touch.  

\---

“How’s your head?” Marty asks every day.  Rust never knows whether he’s asking about the pounding pain that hits about once a day ever since he tried to put his skull through Childress’s, or the electric charges and chemical trails that still tremble at the edges of his vision, or something else, something worse than slow-healing bruises or misfiring synapses.  He's faded from the firebrand Marty knew in their early days, to the low-burning coals of the past few months, to a heap of ash, and Marty can read him easy as any crime scene. And so finally one evening, “how’s your head” evolves into “What the fuck’s going on with you, man?”

His gaze wanders to Marty, unfocused.  “Hmm?”

“You don’t seem like yourself.”

“How’s that?”  

“Well, you’re not as much of a prick, for starters.”  

“That a compliment?”

“Not really.  You let some televangelist play on the TV for twenty minutes yesterday and you never said fuck-all about it, and you been holding that book for the past hour without turning a page.  I mean, two months ago when we were still in the middle of that case you looked a fuckin' mess, but not like this.  Somethin’ ain’t right.”

Two months ago he still had the Man with the Scars, his motherfucking white whale.  He had the fantasy of spitting on Billy Lee’s grave, of justice finally filling in the hollows of Robert Doumain’s eyes and honing down the sharp edge in Toby Boelert’s voice.  It was a meaningless sack of shit and it was heavy to carry, but it was his, and now his hands are empty.  He focuses on digging out a cigarette and lighting it so he can avoid Marty’s eyes.  

“Twenty years now I been the guy working the case, or the guy running from it.  And now--”

(“ _What’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning?_ ” “ _I tell myself I bear witness_.”)

“--and now I don’t know who the fuck I am.”

“Well, I do,” Marty says. “I know exactly who you are.  You’re a good cop and a good man, even when you're bein' complete ass.  You don’t eat enough and you put Tabasco on shit it ain’t supposed to go on.  You don’t like to fish but you like to sit by the lake.  You’re smart as hell but not as smart as you think.  And you take on too much.”  Marty claps a hand on his shoulder and picks up his phone.  “Let’s get dinner from that Thai place you like.”


	14. xenia

_xenia_. hospitality; friendship shown toward guests.

\---

 _You saved my life_ he says    _I owe you everything_.  
You don’t, I say, you don’t owe me squat, let’s just get going, let’s just get gone, but he’s relentless,  
keeps saying   _I owe you_ , says   _Your shoes are filling with your own damn blood,_  
_you must want something, just tell me, and it’s yours._  
        But I can’t look at him, can hardly speak,  
I took the bullet for all the wrong reasons, I’d just as soon kill you myself, I say.  
You keep saying   _I owe you, I owe…_ but you say the same thing every time.  
        Let’s not talk about it, let’s just not talk.  
Not because I don’t believe it, not because I want it any different, but I’m always saving  
and you’re always owing and I’m tired of asking to settle the debt.  
        Don’t bother.  
You never mean it anyway, not really, and it only makes me that much more ashamed.  
There’s only one thing I want, don’t make me say it, just get me bandages, I’m bleeding,  
        I’m not just making conversation.  
There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars.  
\--Richard Siken, “Wishbone”

Winter will end, spring will return.  
The small pestering breezes  
that I so loved, the idiot yellow flowers —  
Spring will return, a dream  
based on a falsehood:  
that the dead return.

Persephone  
was used to death. Now over and over  
her mother hauls her out again--

You must ask yourself:  
are the flowers real?  
\--Louise Glück, “Persephone the Wanderer”

\---

Once he’s mobile enough to make it beyond the fifteen-foot-orbit surrounding the couch that's been his universe for a couple of weeks, Rust notices that the apartment is empty of the countless beer bottles and ever-present Jameson he’s come to expect of Marty’s living space.  “We’re done with that shit,” Marty says, and that’s that, because he heard the doctor say that Rust may want to give his liver a chance to breathe if he wants to see fifty-five and they both know that they’ve officially run out of second chances on a cosmic scale.  But he’s coming off the pain meds now and goddamn if it isn’t hard to sleep.  He spends the night staring at the living-room ceiling, loathing the inside of his own head for the things it won’t stop showing him.

During the day he nods off at the kitchen table, in the car, at the empty desk at Hart Investigative Services that he’s claimed as his own on the days he trails behind Marty to work.  “Wasn’t sleepin,'” he says when he jerks awake, and refuses to go lay down on the couch.  So whenever and wherever he drifts off Marty just lowers the shades and turns off their phones, glowers at birds outside the window: _don’t fucking wake him_. Slaps Rust’s hand away from the pot if he catches him trying to drink coffee past five.  

Marty’s slept badly since Carcosa, too, and when evening starts to spins out into night he begins to putter around the duplex, fixing appliances that don’t need fixing and rearranging things on shelves.  Midnight usually finds him on the couch that serves as Rust’s bed, pretending that what’s on TV is more interesting than it is until he starts to drop off.  Sometimes the flickering light from the screen triggers something in Rust’s head, makes weird patterns in the corners of the room, shadowy bat-shapes.  He lets them come; they don’t rattle him anymore.  He turns the volume lower and lower until it’s a warm cicada buzz; the sound of Marty's breathing beside him is gentle and even like waves on the shore, nudging forward, easing back.  He lets the stillness settle in his limbs and pull him under.

\---

_[Psyche] knew quite as well as Venus did that her looks were not improved by what she had gone through, and always in her mind was the thought that she might suddenly meet Cupid. If only she could make herself more lovely for him._

\---

Rust only makes other people buy his beer when he’s trying to fuck with them.  Truth is he’s never been very good at taking charity, though not as bad as his pop, who used to chase well-meaning church ladies and concerned school counselors off the property with a loaded shotgun.  So when the end of the first month comes around and he sees Marty at the kitchen table, balancing his checkbook with a furrowed brow and his new bifocals perched on the end of his nose, Rust decides enough is enough.

He waits until Marty’s at work and then digs through his papers until he finds bills and bank statements: rent, cable, utilities.  Enough Walmart receipts to give him some idea of what Marty spends on groceries.  He makes painstaking calculations in his ledger and divides by 2.  It’s not much more than they were paying on the house on West Sparrow, but all the same he’ll be damned if he knows how he’s gonna afford this every month.  

He cashes in his last check from Doumain’s, scrapes together what little’s left in his savings, and leaves it in a neat pile on the kitchen table.  Marty glares at him, then stuffs the cash back into Rust’s shirt pocket without a word before stalking out of the room.

“Marty--” he calls after him.  

“Shut the fuck up, Rust.”

\---

A week later he threatens to move out if Marty won’t let him pay half, and Marty says Rust ain’t laying out a goddamn dime as long as he’s still got staples holding his insides together, just leave it the fuck alone, man.  

“I’m not your responsibility, Marty--”

"No, you're my fucking _friend_ , asshole.  So cut it out with your whole--” he waves a hand expressively-- “I-don’t-need-shit-from-anybody bullshit.” The idea is so patently absurd that it must show on his face, because Marty cuts him off before he can protest: “I know, I know, it’s just who you are, people don't change. I ain’t tellin’ you to do something different, I’m just sayin’-- _stop_.  Stop fightin’ me and let someone else worry about shit for ten whole minutes.  It won’t kill you.”

Rust thinks about the cramped chilly cabin adorned with nothing that was not absolutely necessary and the overheated house packed with objects that didn’t mean anything, thinks about the crushing sense of duty that bound him to Travis, bound him to Claire, and realizes that this is the first time he’s getting to _choose_.  “All right,” he answers, almost in a whisper.  

It feels like a surrender of some sort, and it frightens him; but he’s pounded his skull against everyone he’s ever met until they were both bleeding, and he doesn’t want to do that to Marty.  Not anymore.

\---

One morning he is wakened at seven by a racket in the kitchen.  “Where’s the goddamn Phillips head?”

At work Marty was always neater of the two, handling files one at a time and then carefully tucking them out of sight, while Rust spread stacks of notecards on his desk in complex constellations (“I have a _system_ ,” he’d say defensively when his partner walked past, eyeing Rust’s desk with disapproval) or papered the walls with photocopies until he found himself running out of scotch tape at four in the morning.   But Marty was raised in some kind of midcentury Americana social experiment and then graduated college already married to a woman who surveyed the mess of the world and decided it was easier to clean it up herself than to rely on anyone else to do it; Rust isn’t surprised to learn that Marty’s second round of infidelity came to light because Maggie found him doing his own laundry deeply suspicious.  (“She shoulda been the fuckin’ detective,” Marty said with a smile of resigned affection.)

Rust is not contemptuous of other people’s possessions (Laurie always seemed to think he was, and tended to get defensive over every spoon rest and napkin ring), but he can still list from memory every single object he and his father owned, and clutter makes him nervous.  Marty had swept a handful of his tools into Rust’s toolbox at some point, and then left it lying open on the kitchen floor for a week after he’d fixed the leaky kitchen faucet, until Rust couldn’t take it anymore and moved it into the garage and if Marty doesn’t think to look there, well, serves him right.

“Stop moving my shit,” Marty says, pawing through one of the apartment’s six junk drawers.

“You put it in the toolbox,” Rust says, sliding the coffee pot out from the burner.  “Toolbox’s mine.”

“Fine,” Marty retorts, “stop moving _our_ shit.”

\---

They reach a compromise concerning the thermostat: namely, that Rust will quit bitchin’ and put on a goddamn sweater, you _do_ know this is Louisiana, right?  Whenever Marty’s at Walmart he scans the shelves for flannel throws on sale.  Soon there’s a half-dozen of them scattered around the apartment.  When he wakes each morning and sticks his head into the living room, he finds Rust buried beneath three or four of them, the top of his head and the tips of his knees barely visible.

At some point between when Rust puts his shirts in the coat closet and when he sets up a chair and ashtray by the window, Marty stops referring to the front room of the apartment as the living room.  “Hang on,” Rust hears him tell Maggie on the phone, searching for some papers she’d sent over about Macie’s health insurance.  “I think I left ‘em in Rust’s room.”  A couple weeks after that he moves his fishing trophies from the coat closet into the garage and the old dresser from the garage to the coat closet.  “You wanna decorate or anything?” he asks.

He’s seen Rust angry and annoyed and, on very rare occasions, amused, but he honestly doesn’t think he’s ever seen him _surprised_.  It’s nothing obvious--just an almost imperceptible lifting of the eyebrows before Rust goes back to placing his carefully folded socks and undershirts into the dresser drawers.  “Sorry. Stupid question.”  

But the following week they stop at a neighbor’s yard sale--there’s always fishing equipment to be had at yard sales--and Marty turns to find Rust standing there with a wicker shelf about two feet high, dangling from one hand with the same lackadaisical ease as the cigarette hanging from his mouth.  “Never saw you with one before,” Marty says after they load it into the trunk.  “Back in the day you seemed to think the floor was your bookshelf.”

“Just woulda been one more thing to move when it came time to go,” Rust says, and there’s an unspoken promise in his words.

A month later they go out to Church Point to clear out anything that state PD had left in Rust’s storage unit--his books, his cot, the cooler still holding three warm six-packs of Old Milwaukee, the coffee maker and lawn chairs he’d been carting around since his CID days.  He throws out almost everything, even most of the books; he has no desire to thumb through _Offender Profiling_ or _The Death Investigation Handbook_ or _Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives_  ever again.  He keeps only the Roethke, takes it back to the apartment and puts it on the wicker shelf next to the couch.

He had a lot of books as a kid, most of them stolen from his school library.  History and astronomy and art, adventure stories, religious texts. When sky was ice-gray for weeks on end he’d crack open a battered hardback of Matisse prints and feel the colors sing against his teeth like radio signals; at midsummer, when the sun was out twenty hours a day and he couldn’t sleep, he’d hide under the bedsheets with _The Murders in the Rue Morgue_.  He left his books behind when he left Alaska, knowing he wouldn’t be back for them and that Travis wouldn’t ship them if he asked.  He wonders how long the old man held out, how cold it had to get before he’d feed them into the squat little coal stove in the dark of one subzero night.  Maybe he never did; maybe he held out hope that his heartless, faithless son would return.  Maybe they’re still there, rotting beside him, a nesting-place for martens and mice.

He scours used bookstores, garage sales, the shelves of thrift stores.  He bends back covers and feels paper crease beneath his hands, fills the edges with cramped marginalia, keeps his place with Hart and Cohle Investigative Services business cards.  He occupies the books as you would a house.  Soon the little wicker shelf is packed full.


	15. thaumatogeny

_thaumatogeny_. the belief that the origin of life was the result of a miracle.

\---

I was young here. Riding  
the subway with my small book  
as though to defend myself against  
the same world:  
_you are not alone_ ,  
the poem said,  
in the dark tunnel.  
\--Louise Glück, “October”

Yet this is the watch by night. Let us all accept new strength, and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.  
\--Arthur Rimbaud, _A Season in Hell_

\---

When Rust’s stitches have come out and even Maggie grudgingly admits that his torn-up and reconstructed intestines can probably handle “whatever shit usually passes for food with you two,” Marty announces that he’s making them both a nice dinner.  He asks for suggestions but Rust sort of sputters helplessly about not being precisely sure what constitutes _nice_ , so Marty throws up his hands and makes spaghetti with hot sauce.  

Rust’s tongue loosens with the heat and he hears Texas start to tumble out of his mouth, Texas when he was twenty-three and still walking around with ice in his belly, chasing down warmth wherever he could find it.  He starts to tell Marty about dim taquerias where the shutters were always closed against the blazing midday sun, about corn and rice and tomatillos and misguided attempts to recreate salsa verde in his tiny kitchen with one saucepan and a steak knife, of guajillo and poblano and anaheim filling his throat with sharp bright fire.  

“You should try to make some of that shit you were talking about,” Marty says a week later in the produce section at Kroger.  “It sounded good.”

So Rust slices onions, squeezes limes, chops cilantro and arranges it into warm green lines across the cutting board.  He sifts peppers like an alchemist’s powders, scooping them into tiny desert dunes of soft beige and fire-red and deep maroon.  He imagines each one settling into bright layers on the bottom of an hourglass, marking his time here: _July_ _12th, ancho. August 26th, chipotle.  October 1st, cumin._

\---

_Cupid was healed of his wound by now and longing for Psyche. It is a difficult matter to keep Love imprisoned. Venus had locked the door, but there were the windows._

_\---_

Rust’s wardrobe is clean and unstained, more or less, but everything somehow looks wrinkled even when it’s not.  Marty doesn’t say anything, just straightens his tie and lifts his eyebrows slightly when they get into the car to go to work.  So Rust returns to the thrift store, which in the eighteen years since his first visit has gone from being a Goodwill, to a Salvation Army, to a Kirkland’s, to one of those places where they take your stuff and sell it online, back to a Goodwill again.  He leaves with five shirts--two warm dark blue, two cool gray, one a bright, stainless white.  

He wears it once, then it disappears into the hamper and never emerges, and four days later he’s standing before the coat closet doing inventory (eleven shirts, four pairs of slacks, boots) and wondering where the hell his white shirt is.

He never could just let something missing stay missing, of course (there’s a sick joke about the Childress case in there somewhere), so he tears the place apart until he finds it buried in the laundry room trash under lint balls and an empty detergent bottle, and then he confronts Marty about why the fuck he threw out his new shirt.  

“It freaked me out, man,” he says uneasily, shuffling from one foot to the other.  Rust holds the shirt out aggressively and Marty's peering at it out of the corner of his eye. 

“This some weird phobia I never heard of?”

“No, asshole.  I mean, it’s what you were wearin’ when we--when you--” he gestures helplessly towards Rust’s abdomen.  “It just reminded me of it and I guess it fucked me all up.”

It was Marty’s, that shirt.  It was hanging in the back of the office--an old habit left over from his CID days, when the working day often turned into the working night or longer, which is exactly what happened there at the end of the Childress case.  Freshly laundered and starched, because Marty wasn’t gonna become one of those schlubby divorced guys, even if it meant paying $2.50 a shirt to have them ironed at the dry cleaner’s.  One white, one pale green, and Rust always had a yen for the symbolic so dressing up like a sacrificial lamb seemed to be the obvious choice.  

When Childress stumbled and let go, Rust dropped like a stone and didn’t lift his head again until four days later in the hospital, so he never saw what it looked like, though he remembers the feeling of tacky wetness on his hands.  It must have been very white, that shirt, in the blue half-light of that place, against the pale metal of the blade and the inkstain of his insides.

He thinks of the time his nose dripped blood onto his scrambled eggs in Laredo and Morales just rolled his eyes.  He thinks of Travis setting his arm: his expression never changed, even when Rust’s breath whistled between his clenched teeth; he was faraway that day, as usual, his mind somewhere in a tent or a jungle or a Saigon whorehouse.  He thinks of that scratch down his face the day of Sophia’s funeral and wonders if Claire felt anything at all when she scrubbed the red flakes out from under her fingernails.  None of these thoughts bother him; he’s seen his own blood plenty of times.  It’s never occurred to him that anyone else would be bothered by it, but Marty’s got a look on his face that makes him think of the driveway of the house on West Sparrow.  Afterwards he gave it a wide berth, parked on the street and cut through the yard, skirted around the bushes along the side of the house and came in through the back door, and Claire said _stop fucking doing that, every time you do that it just fucking reminds me of what happened out there_ and he said _good. We don’t get to forget_.  Marty’s white shirt must have ended up in a hospital incinerator or biohazard bin but now here it is again, risen from the fucking dead like Christ himself.  The holes stayed in His side, though, and Marty can still see the blood coming out of Rust; nothing ever heals, not completely.

He doesn’t say anything, just nods and throws the shirt back in the trash.

\---

The forensics team is still going, even after all these months: deeper and deeper into the soil of the Childresses’ yard, further and further back into that place out behind it.  From time to time Lutz calls with an update.  Rust lets the phone ring; Marty sits in the corner of the kitchen, chews the cap of his ballpoint pen, jots down things on a notepad every now and then.  Afterwards he leaves the notes around for Rust to decide for himself whether he wants to look at them.  He never does.

It’s after eleven and Marty’s announcing his intention to go to bed when his cell rings.  “Turn on the TV,” he says, phone pressed to his ear.  Special report on the local news.  They’ve brought in a team from the FBI; they say IDing all the bodies will take months, maybe longer.  Rust hopes his old boss Bob Doumain isn’t watching the news tonight.

The old fort is a maze of boobytraps built from shoelaces, femurs, strands of hair; the television cameras can barely make out anything in the darkness, which is a small mercy.  They found a dress in there that they reckon dates all the way back to the forties, and they’re not even halfway through yet.  The dress looks yellow, but that could be age.  

In the yard there are bones beneath bones, each layer a decade or so--mid-70s at the earliest, at the very bottom.  There are no grown women that far down, no girls or boys on the cusp of puberty; just children, very small children, two or three years old.  He must have started off that way, taking toddlers.  It must have been easier.

“These are the finger-bones of an unidentified female,” a faceless special agent pronounces, “between one and three years of age.”  

Marty turns the TV off before Rust has to ask him to.  He reaches into the drawer beneath the coffee table and pulls out a deck of cards.  “Feel like a game?”

“Thought you were going to bed.”  

“Beating your ass at Go Fish sounds like a lot more fun.”

“You babysitting me?”  Rust says defensively.  “What the hell do you think I’m gonna get up to if left to my own devices?” He regrets the words as soon as they’re out; _I’m ready to tie it off_ is still hanging in the air between them after all these months.

“Probably chainsmoke and stare at the fucking wall and blame yourself for a lot of shit that ain’t your fault,” Marty snaps.  “And you can go ahead and do that if your mind’s set on it, but you shouldn’t be doing it alone.”  He starts to shuffle the cards, his fingers strangely clumsy.  “Hell, I shouldn’t either, maybe.”

The next day Marty calls the girls and invites them to have breakfast, although he doesn’t so much ask as inform repeatedly in a deferential tone with lots of expansive gesturing, a method of persuasion Rust has witnessed many times over the years.  By the fourth or fifth “sure would be good to see y’all” they’ve both given in and agreed to meet their father at the Cracker Barrel the following morning.

“This is weird,” Macie says, breaking the most recent of a half-dozen awkward silences.

Audrey just raises her eyebrows.  For all her artistic rebellion, she is not the straightforward one of the family; she mutters half-bitten-off truths behind the rims of water glasses and tears napkins nervously.  But Macie has a haircut at eleven and an interview for an internship at two, followed by dinner with her roommate and drinks with her boyfriend.  She doesn’t have time for cringingly uncomfortable conversations about the merits of blueberry pancakes versus French toast.

“It’s not weird,” Marty says impatiently, pushing his failed attempt at the peg game over to one side.   _LEAVE THREE AND YOU’RE JUST PLAIN DUMB_ , the small letters burnt into the wood sneer.

“It’s a little weird,” Rust mutters over the edge of his menu.  

“Nobody asked you.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t ask to come.”

“Children,” Audrey says, pulling the wooden triangle over and plucking out the pegs, “stop fighting.”

\---

_So all came to a most happy end. Love and the Soul (for that is what Psyche means) had sought and, after sore trials, found each other; and that union could never be broken._

\---

“Maybe we should get away for the Fourth,” Marty muses.  “The Corporate Tool offered his place on the Gulf.  They ain't using it this year 'cause they're going to see Maggie's parents instead.  Good fishing down there.”  

“You can refer to Ted as the Corporate Tool,” Rust says without looking up from his book, “or you can take advantage of the fruits of his industry.  To do both would be the height of hypocrisy.”  

“I can live with that.”

They just about sweat to death and the mosquitos get them something fierce, but Marty does up a couple fish on the grill one night and Rust does burgers the next, and after the sun goes down the frogs start up their guttural concertina and the fog rolls heavy across the sky like smoke; and Rust wakes to find he’s slept the whole night through--the whole fucking night, for the first time in probably twenty years or more.

The next day he catches Marty smiling.  “What?”

“Nothin.’”  

He slides the tea pitcher back into the fridge, kicks it closed, narrows his eyes.  “ _What_ , Marty.”

“You look less ragged is all,” Marty says, piling four tuna-fish sandwiches and a mound of potato chips onto a single plate.  “Here, let’s take these out back.  Grab my drink, will ya?”

When the meal is done they go back out on the water; it's July sixth and some folks across the way are sending the last of their fireworks off into the dusk, and Rust thinks of the inherent violence of Independence Day celebrations, the nasty images in the unsung verses of the national anthem, the bonfires on Gallows Hill in Salem, the savage history that runs beneath the holiday like a burning mine under your feet, and of course before he even realizes it he’s saying it all out loud and has to stop himself before Marty can make the boat a place of silent reflection.  

He heard one of his teachers say once that it wasn’t the Cohle kid’s fault he was so weird, Lord knows his daddy didn’t have the sense God gave a peanut.  He remembers a classmate blowing up at him during a sixth-grade study group: _You can’t say shit like that.  Your old man should’ve taught you not to say shit like that, but he’s weirder than you are_.  “Sorry,” he trails off.  “Got carried away.”

“Comes with the territory,” Marty says easily, casting his line out again.  “Sometimes when I reckon you’re gonna be goin’ awhile, I start making to-do lists in my head.”

Marty likes to fish because fishing makes sense to him in the same way the job did: you learn where to cast your line, what bait will hook whom, how to wait patiently for the tug.  He tests the slack on his line with a practiced hand and starts to talk about about poppers and jigs, crankbait and spinnerbait, weight and color and shape, as Rust leans back in the boat and turns the pages of his book with one hand while he lets the fingers of the other trail into the water.  He knows Rust isn’t really listening and doesn’t mind.  

For Rust, the job was like looking up at the night sky, something overwhelming and terrifying and vast, until you learned to spot the patterns.  He points to the sky with two fingers, traces out constellations with the tip of his cigarette, speaks of ancient myth.  Marty can’t tell one clutch of stars from another but he likes the stories.  “How come you never told me about all this back in the day?” he asks, tilting his head back to look up at the stars.

“Tried to, once,” Rust says.  “Words wouldn’t come right, not how I wanted.  And I figured you’d just tell me to shut the fuck up.”

“When you were a kid,” Marty says, “what did you hope your life would be like when you got old?”

“You callin’ me old, motherfucker?”  Rust chuckles, tilts his head back and sends a series of smoke rings up towards the sky.  He thinks a moment; it’s a real question, one that warrants a real answer.  “Steady enough work that I’d have money to buy as many books as I wanted.  Live somewhere warm.”  And, because he knows Marty wants him to ask: “What about you?”

“Find somebody who’s willing to put up with my bullshit, I reckon,” he answers.  “Go fishing on weekends.”

They don’t speak after that, just let the weight of what’s been said settle and curl around them like soft summer air.  The boat rocks them easy on the water. 


End file.
